Cassini's Fantastic Photos of Recent Enceladus Flyby

Here is a historic photo taken by the Cassini probe of it's

recent dive through the frozen water geyser erupting from Enceladus'south pole. On the 28th of October 2015 Cassini dove to within 18.6 miles of Enceladus' surface. The tiny icey moon is thought to be a promicing hideout for alien life. The geyser (which is geothermally heated) is spewing water which Cassini availed itself of. So at 12,000 mph the probe collected a drop which it is now analyzing .

Check out the complete Gizmodo article by selecting HERE

Review: Pixels

I got a chance to watch Pixels on DVD recently on recommendation of a friend.  The recommendation was 

based on the movie having some science fiction elements. Which I will concede that it had in spades. 

What I wasn't told was that the film was banal, derivative and redundant. 

What is wrong with Adam Sandler? Him and his dream production team of Chris Columbus, Mark Radcliffe 

and others certainly got the job done, but should this turd even been attempted. First how far are 

we suppose to buy into Kevin James as President of the United States?!!  And how many times are we to

be subjected to the worn thin plot device of Aliens receiving age old tv shows and take them as a 

declaration of war?

Elements of Science Fiction? Yeah, ok.  But more like 100% brown stinker. 

If you want 106 minutes of totally mindless diversion, this might do the trick. Otherwise, put the 

movie down and back away slowly you can watch the trailer online which is all the best parts anyway.

Voyager1's Last Engineer Retires

Here is a sceanerio worth putting your mind to.  
Imagine you're in charge of a computer that is 40 years old. That's right, a computer right out of the Atari age.

As fantastical as it sounds, that is exactly the problem facing NASA's voyager mission now that the last remaining engineer Larry Zottarelli is retiring at the age of eighty.

We have established that Voyager1 (which in 2013 left the the solar system completely) is indeed old, (it is amazing that the craft is operational at all!) but it is also an amagingly far from Earth at somewhere near 15 billion miles!

Suzy Dodd, Voyager1's present project manager, says flying voyager1 is like flying an Apple II computer.

At launch Voyager1 hefted a beefy 64kb of memory. Not megabytes, not gigabytes but sixty four Kilo Bytes!  It's data is recorded on an eight track tape!

There are so many more nothing short of amazing data points about Voyager1, one is a wonder the

craft continues to fly at all!

Check out the Fox 40 online article HERE to get to the original article.   

check out this youtube entry

You just have to check out this you tube entry.

 From YouTube is the Vblog  Smarter Every Day  and entails the sophistication and high tech that went into the design of the drill head on the curiosity mars rover

youtube smarter every day entry

White Dwarf Caught Destroying a Large Asteroid

 

A Ceres-like asteroid is slowly disintegrating as it orbits a white dwarf star. Astronomers have spotted telltales signs of such an object using data from the Kepler K2 mission. It is the first planetary object detected transiting a white dwarf. Within about a million years the object will be destroyed, leaving a thin dusting of metals on the surface of the white dwarf.

During observations of the white dwarf WD 1145+017, astronomers noticed  the presence of several planetary pieces in orbit.   The total mass of debris is thought to be around the size of the asteroid Ceres in our solar system's main asteroid belt.

These small planetary husks, all having orbits of between 4.5 to 4.9 hours, are too small to be seen by themselves; but their presence became known when the researchers detected huge dust clouds trailing them in their orbits. Follow-up observations by ground-based observatories were used to decipher what elements are inside the debris.

read the complete article here

There is a huge hole in the Sun!

There is a huge hole in the Sun!

How big you might query .

Try 50 Earths that's how big.

As scary as a hole 50 Earths might be it is even scarier  because  the  huge  hole  spews  out  a
stream  of  high - speed solar wind, creating a geomagnetic  storm  close  to our own planet.

The image was taken on October 10 in wavelengths of 193 Angstroms, which is invisible to our
eyes. The dark spot, known as a coronal hole, which materialized last week remains harmless to
humans  on Earth but can interfere  with satellite  communications and some high-altitude radio
signals.

Coronal holes appear randomly on the outer layer of the sun, making it look darker than the
rest  of  the  star.   Caused  b y anomalies  in  the sun's  magnetic  field,  th e darker patch is
abundant with colder, less dense, low-energy gas and plasma.

Find complete article HERE

Woman Controls Jet Sim With Only Her Mind

Jan Sheuermann's main goal was to feed herself.  She ended up
piloting the world’s most expensive fighter jet.

 Sheuermann is unable to move her arms and legs due to a neurodegenerative disease.  Scientists from  Darpa and the University of Pittsburgh  approached her in 2012 and two years later, towards the end of her stint as a neuromotor guinea pig, the scientists changed the game. Instead of connecting Sheuermann’s brain interface to a robotic arm, they connected her to a flight simulator.  Using the same neural connections to   pilot an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. 

 complete wired article HERE

India Now Has a Space Telescope

 A recent launch has added to India's capability by launching it's first space observatory.

Called Astrosat  along with satellites from the US, Canada, and Indonesia from the Satish Dhawan Space Center.

Astrosat will study distant stars, white dwarfs, pulsars, and   supermassive black holes

Astrosat on Wikipedia