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Is December 21st the end of the world, NASA says not at all. Video.
Summary:
The Maya Calendar shows an end of a cycle according to the way they used to measure time in thousands of years.
Our christian calendar at least for the west countries of the world measures time by years, that ends every December 31st and starts every January 1st.
Other speculations about earth shifting its axe, solar storm, planets alignament and a planet coming to crash with the earth, are well dismissed and answered by a NASA expert on the video.
NASA unveils new Earth at Night detailed views. Video.
Earth At Night
In daylight our big blue marble is all land, oceans and clouds. But the night - is electric.
This view of Earth at night is a cloud-free view from space as acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite (Suomi NPP). A joint program by NASA and NOAA, Suomi NPP captured this nighttime image by the satellite's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS).
The day-night band on VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, gas flares, and wildfires. This new image is a composite of data acquired over nine days in April and thirteen days in October 2012. It took 312 satellite orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of land surface.
This video uses the Earth at night view created by NASA's Earth Observatory with data processed by NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center and combined with a version of the Earth Observatory's Blue Marble: Next Generation.
NASA's Space Launch System Using Futuristic Technology to Build the Next Generation of Rockets.Video.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. is using a method called selective laser melting, or SLM, to create intricate metal parts for America's next heavy-lift rocket. Using this state-of-the-art technique will benefit the agency by saving millions in manufacturing costs.
NASA is building the Space Launch System or SLS -- a rocket managed at the Marshall Center and designed to take humans, equipment and experiments beyond low Earth orbit to nearby asteroids and eventually to Mars.
SLM is similar to 3-D printing and is the future of manufacturing.
"Basically, this machine takes metal powder and uses a high-energy laser to melt it in a designed pattern," says Ken Cooper, advanced manufacturing team lead at the Marshall Center. "The laser will layer the melted dust to fuse whatever part we need from the ground up, creating intricate designs. The process produces parts with complex geometries and precise mechanical properties from a three-dimensional computer-aided design."
There are two major benefits to this process, which are major considerations for the Space Launch System Program: savings and safety.
"This process significantly reduces the manufacturing time required to produce parts from months to weeks or even days in some cases," said Andy Hardin, the integration hardware lead for the Engines Office in SLS. "It's a significant improvement in affordability, saving both time and money. Also, since we're not welding parts together, the parts are structurally stronger and more reliable, which creates an overall safer vehicle."
The emerging technology will build parts for America's next flagship rocket more affordably and efficiently, while increasing the safety of astronauts and the workforce. Some of the "printed" engine parts will be structurally tested and used in hot-fire tests of a J-2X engine later this year. The J-2X will be used as the upper stage engine for the SLS.
The goal is to use selective laser melting to manufacture parts on the first SLS test flight in 2017.
The agency procured the M2 Cusing machine, built by Concept Laser -- a division of Hoffman Innovation Group of Lichtenfels, Germany to perform the selective-laser-manufacturing.
Hip-hop musician will.i.am's "Reach for the Stars" officially became the first song broadcast from Mars today, thanks to a signal beamed from NASA's Curiosity rover.
"This is the first time that a song's ever come from another planet," Leland Melvin, NASA's associate administrator for education and a former astronaut, told students at an educational event at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Why they say the sky is the limit When I�ve seen the footprints on the moon Why do they say the sky is the limit When I�ve seen the footprints on the moon And I know the sky might be high But baby it ain�t really that high And I know that Mars might be far But baby it ain�t really that far Let�s reach for the stars Reach for the stars Let�s reach for the stars Reach for the stars Let�s reach for the stars Reach for the stars Let�s reach for the stars (Let, let, let, let me see your hands up) (Let me see your hands up) Can�t nobody hold us back They can�t hold us down They can�t keep us trapped Tie us to the ground Told your people that We don�t mess around When we turn it up Please don�t turn us down We will turn it up Louder than we were before Like the lion out the jungle, you can hear us roar When I lie in here, it�s like a sonic blaster Flying just like NASA, out of space master
Hands up, reach for the sky Hands up, get �em up high Hands up, if you really feel alive Live it up, live it up Why they say the sky is the limit When I�ve seen the footprints on the moon Why do they say the sky is the limit When I�ve seen the footprints on the moon And I know the sky might be high But baby it ain�t really that high And I know that Mars might be far But baby it ain�t really that far Let�s reach for the stars Reach for the stars Let�s reach for the stars Reach for the stars Let�s reach for the stars Reach for the stars Let�s reach for the stars Source: Cosmiclog
An expert panel found that this phenomenon, more and more common, occur within the next two years and may affect global electrical systems and satellites in orbit.
Usually we are used to understand the concept of "natural disaster" in phenomena such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves and tsunamis. However, a group of NASA scientists warned of an event that is still contingency plans in the world, solar storms.
Solar storms are phenomena which have been heard enough in recent times but could increase with the years.
The panel found that by 2014 the world will face a wave could affect solar electricity systems, communications and satellites around the world.
This could be the biggest event in a cycle of 10 years in the activity of the star and, if filed, would be the first in more than 100 years.
Among the possible consequences that could cause the magnetically charged plasma on earth, is the melting of the electrical transformers in the world, damage satellites and communication systems.
The last solar storm of this magnitude occurred in 1859. At the time, the British astronomer Richard Carrington observed the large solar flare and timed the arrival of geomagnetic storms caused by the phenomenon to Earth with a delay of about 17 hours.
According to reports at the time, the solar storm was so massive that formed northern lights that could be seen much further south than where they usually are.
The question that remains for NASA experts is what the actual impact of a storm of this nature, taking into account the number of satellites in orbit and the effects of their damage globally.
Obama calls NASA Curiosity Team: If you find any martian even a microbe, I want to know about it right away.
President Obama Calls Curiosity Team
President Obama phoned the team at JPL on Monday, Aug. 13, to congratulate them on the successful landing of Curiosity. "It's inspiring to all of us. Photographs that are coming back are going to be remarkable and amazing," President Obama said.
"If, in fact, you do make contact with Martians, please let me know right away. I've got a lot of other things on my plate, but I suspect that that would go to the top of the list, even if they're just microbes," he said.
NASA releases video and color photo,of Mars rover landing.
NASA has released a low resolution video of the Curiosity Rover during the final few minutes of its decent to the Martian surface . Video silent.
Curiosity snaps the first color view of the north wall and rim of Gale Crater, where NASA's Mars rover landed Sunday night. The picture was taken by the rover's camera at the end of its stowed robotic arm and appears fuzzy because of dust on the camera's cover.
The color photo from the ancient crater where Curiosity landed showed a pebbly landscape and the rim of Gale Crater off in the distance. Curiosity snapped the photo on the first day on the surface after touching down on Mars Sunday night.
The rover took the shot with a camera at the end of its robotic arm, which remained stowed. The landscape looked fuzzy because the camera's removable cover was coated with dust that kicked up during the descent to the ground.
NASA celebrated the precision landing of a rover on Mars and marveled over the mission's flurry of photographs — grainy, black-and-white images of Martian gravel, a mountain at sunset and, most exciting of all, the spacecraft's plunge through the red planet's atmosphere.
Curiosity, a roving laboratory the size of a compact car, landed right on target late Sunday after an eight-month, 352-million-mile journey. It parked its six wheels about four miles from its ultimate science destination — Mount Sharp, rising from the floor of Gale Crater near the equator.
Extraordinary efforts were needed for the landing because the rover weighs one ton, and the thin Martian atmosphere offers little friction to slow down a spacecraft. Curiosity had to go from 13,000 mph to zero in seven minutes, unfurling a parachute, then firing rockets to brake. In a Hollywood-style finish, cables delicately lowered it to the ground at 2 mph.
At the end of what NASA called "seven minutes of terror," the vehicle settled into place almost perfectly flat in the crater it was aiming for.
"We have ended one phase of the mission much to our enjoyment," mission manager Mike Watkins said. "But another part has just begun."
The nuclear-powered Curiosity will dig into the Martian surface to analyze what's there and hunt for some of the molecular building blocks of life, including carbon.
It won't start moving for a couple of weeks, because all the systems on the $2.5 billion rover have to be checked out. Color photos and panoramas will start coming in the next few days.
But first NASA had to use tiny cameras designed to spot hazards in front of Curiosity's wheels. So early images of gravel and shadows abounded. The pictures were fuzzy, but scientists were delighted.
The photos show "a new Mars we have never seen before," Watkins said. "So every one of those pictures is the most beautiful picture I have ever seen."
In one of the photos from the close-to-the-ground hazard cameras, if you squinted and looked the right way, you could see "a silhouette of Mount Sharp in the setting sun," said an excited John Grotzinger, chief mission scientist from the California Institute of Technology.
A high-resolution camera on the orbiting 7-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, flying 211 miles directly above the plummeting Curiosity, snapped a photo of the rover dangling from its parachute about a minute from touchdown. The parachute's design can be made out in the photo.
"It's just mind-boggling to me," said Miguel San Martin, chief engineer for the landing team.
Curiosity is the heaviest piece of machinery NASA has landed on Mars, and the success gave the space agency confidence that it can unload equipment that astronauts may need in a future manned trip to the red planet.
The landing technique was hatched in 1999 in the wake of devastating back-to-back Mars spacecraft losses. Back then, engineers had no clue how to land super-heavy spacecraft. They brainstormed different possibilities, consulting Apollo-era engineers and pilots of heavy-lift helicopters.
"I think its engineering at its finest. What engineers do is they make the impossible possible," said former NASA chief technologist Bobby Braun. "This thing is elegant. People say it looks crazy. Each system was designed for a very specific function."
Because of budget constraints, NASA canceled its joint U.S.-European missions to Mars, scheduled for 2016 and 2018.
"When's the next lander on Mars? The answer to that is nobody knows," Bolden said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
But if Curiosity finds something interesting, he said, it could spur the public and Congress to provide more money for more Martian exploration. No matter what, he said, Curiosity's mission will help NASA as it tries to send astronauts to Mars by the mid-2030s.
Science: NASA: Strange and sudden massive melt in Greenland.
Nearly all of Greenland's massive ice sheet suddenly started melting a bit this month, a freak event that surprised scientists.
Even Greenland's coldest and highest place, Summit station, showed melting. Ice core records show that last happened in 1889 and occurs about once every 150 years.
Three satellites show what NASA calls unprecedented melting of the ice sheet that blankets the island, starting on July 8 and lasting four days. Most of the thick ice remains. While some ice usually melts during the summer, what was unusual was that the melting happened in a flash and over a widespread area.
"You literally had this wave of warm air wash over the Greenland ice sheet and melt it," NASA ice scientist Tom Wagner said Tuesday.
The ice melt area went from 40 percent of the ice sheet to 97 percent in four days, according to NASA. Until now, the most extensive melt seen by satellites in the past three decades was about 55 percent.
Wagner said researchers don't know how much of Greenland's ice melted, but it seems to be freezing again.
"When we see melt in places that we haven't seen before, at least in a long period of time, it makes you sit up and ask what's happening?" NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati said. It's a big signal, the meaning of which we're going to sort out for years to come."
About the same time, a giant iceberg broke off from the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland. And the National Snow and Ice Data Center on Tuesday announced that the area filled with Arctic sea ice continues near a record low.
Wagner and other scientists said because this Greenland-wide melting has happened before they can't yet determine if this is a natural rare event or one triggered by man-made global warming. But they do know that the edges of Greenland's ice sheets have already been thinning because of climate change.
Summer in Greenland has been freakishly warm so far. That's because of frequent high pressure systems that have parked over the island, bringing warm clear weather that melts ice and snow, explained University of Georgia climatologist Thomas Mote.
He and others say it's similar to the high pressure systems that have parked over the American Midwest bringing record-breaking warmth and drought.
Ohio State University ice scientist Jason Box, who returned Tuesday from a three-week visit, said he ditched his cold weather gear for the cotton pants that he normally dons in Nevada.
"It was sunny and warm and all the locals were talking about how sunny it was," Box said after getting off a plane. "Beyond T-shirt weather."
LOS ANGELES (AP) Two months before NASA is set to land its most sophisticated rover on Mars, engineers on Earth are busy troubleshooting a nagging concern with the rover's drill that could contaminate rock samples gathered for study.
Project managers said Monday they were confident the rover nicknamed Curiosity will still be able to achieve its goals despite the hurdle.
For the past month, a team has been studying ways to get around the contamination problem, in which flakes of Teflon from the drill can break off and get mixed in with the rock samples. The effort so far has drained $2 million from the mission's reserve budget.
"It's not a serious problem because we see so many potential ways to work around this," said chief scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology.
Curiosity is on target to land at Gale Crater near the Martian equator in early August. Instead of relying on airbags to land like previous Mars surface missions, Curiosity will be lowered to the surface on a tether and fire its thrusters to touch down. This never-before-tried landing technique has allowed scientists to zero in on the landing site.
Curiosity is now slated to land closer to a mountain in the center of the crater, which will cut down on the amount of driving it will initially need to do.
Project manager Pete Theisinger of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory estimated this will save about four months of driving, allowing more time to study Martian rocks and soil.
The two-year, $2.5 billion mission seeks to determine whether the environment could have been suitable for microbial life. One of the main goals is to search for the organic building blocks of life using the most advanced toolkit sent to Mars.
Curiosity is a mobile science lab. The drill is located at the end of its robotic arm along with a scoop. It's designed to bore into bedrock and scoop up powdered grains that are then transferred to Curiosity's deck to analyze.
Tests before launch revealed Teflon from the drill can rub off and taint the samples. Some workarounds being considered include baking the samples so that the contaminant is separated out. The team is also pondering switching to a different, gentler drilling mode in certain cases.
In the worst case scenario, scientists may have to rely on the scoop to collect soil and Curiosity's wheels to crush rocks into bits.
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Follow Alicia Chang's coverage at http://www.twitter.com/SciWriAlicia .
Instruments aboard NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) have captured stunning images of the June 5 and 6 transit of Venus across the Sun. The images give a fine detail view of an event that will not happen again until 2117.
