Kepler mission confirms the discovery of first rocky planet

NASA Ames researchers have released some really interesting news. The team has confirmed the existence of a rocky planet. The FIRST rocky planet outside our solar system. The planet is designated Kepler-10b. At about 1 1/2 times bigger than Earth it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.

Kepler-10b's sun resides in the Cygnus constellation about 560 light-years distant. The planet is truly an unusual discovery. Up to this point the planets being discovered had for the most part been gas giants many time the size of Earth. Even so, it could not support life. It orbits several times closer to its parent star than our planet Mercury. That makes the surface temperature hotter than a lava flow on Earth. Kepler-10b is so close in its orbit that its parent sun's magnetic field has stripped it of any atmosphere.

Below is some NASA animation of Kepler-10b and go here for the complete NASA article.





Thanks to Dan for the original post

Young Scientists Design Open-Source Program at NASA

From "Wired"

NASA scientists plan to announce a new open-source project this month called CosmosCode -- it's aimed at recruiting volunteers to write code for live space missions. The program was launched quietly last year under NASA's CoLab entrepreneur outreach program, created by scientists from the NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Members of the CosmosCode group have been meeting in Second Life and will open the program to the public in the coming weeks, organizers said. CosmosCode is indicative of a larger shift at NASA toward openness and transparency -- things for which complex and bureaucratic government labs are not known. The software project is part of CoLab, an effort to invite the public to help NASA scientists with various engineering problems. NASA is also digging into its files from previous missions and releasing code that until now remained behind closed doors. Together, these projects are creating a sort of SourceForge for space. NASA has already released more than 20 open-source software titles, including World Wind, a 3-D virtual globe similar to Google Earth, and Vision Workbench, a framework for computer vision applications. Organizers of CosmosCode will create a wish list of software, which could include applications such as mission-design and flight software.