“It’s very important,” agreed Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, top Republican on the Senate science committee, which oversees NASA. “Every step that’s taken toward fulfilling the role (private companies) have been given by the administration is important.”

The company, headquartered in Hawthorne, Ca., reported successfully test-firing its new SuperDraco engine essential to the escape system necessary for the mission to the space station.

SpaceX, which has a $1.6 billion contract to fly cargo to the space station, isn’t the only company in the mix.
Orbital Sciences Corp., which has the only other commercial crew contract ($1.9 billion, eight flights), plans a test launch of its Antares (formerly Taurus II) rocket fairly soon, to be followed by a demonstration flight of its Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the station.

The findings nearly double the number of confirmed planets that Kepler has found since 2009. Scattered across 11 planetary systems, their temperatures would be too hot for survival, as they all circle their stars closer than Venus. The planets orbit their stars between every six and 143 days.

“Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky,” said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA headquarters. “Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates,” he added.

“This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits.”

In December last year, NASA announced Kepler had confirmed its first-ever planet in a habitable zone outside the solar system, Kepler 22b. Such planets have the right distance from their star to support water, plus a suitable temperature and atmosphere to support life. Kepler 22b is 2.4 times the size of the Earth, is 600 light years away, and orbits its Sun-like star every 290 days.

Astronomers have also discovered the three smallest planets ever found beyond the solar system, and the smallest is the size of Mars, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Using data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope to observe flickers from a star called KOI-961, the scientists discovered planets about .78, .73, and .57 times as large as Earth, the agency said in a press release.

In an article published in this month’s Science, NASA said its Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded Comet C/2011 N3 nearing the sun and burning to nothing over a 20-minute span in July. NASA describes the event as “Comet corpses in the solar wind.”

The comet was about the size of an aircraft carrier and was part of the Kreutz family of comets believed to be remnants of a giant parent comet that broke apart some 2,500 years ago, the report said.

This is believed to be the fifth time in history that people have observed what turned out to be chemically confirmed martian material falling to Earth. Out of the approximately 24,000 known meteorites to have fallen to Earth, only about 34 have been verified to be martian in origin. Some of the rocks, which are very rare on Earth, are being sold from US$11,000 to $22,500 per ounce, which is about ten times more than the cost of gold.

Meteorites confirmed to be from Mars fell to Earth in 1815, 1865, 1911 and 1962. The more recent they fell, the less they are contaminated by its natural processes. The meteorites have provided scientists with great insight about the geology of Mars. “Because it’s so fresh, if you find organics in this sample, you can be pretty sure those organics are Martian,” said Carl Agee, director of the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico.

Some scientists think that a large object struck Mars millions of years ago, cuainsg the material’s ejection from the planet.

The Russian Federal Space Agency said the spacecraft was in a near-Earth orbit with perigee 113.8 km and apogee 133.2 km at 8.15 p.m. UTC yesterday. It fell into the Pacific ocean around 9.45 p.m.

It is unknown whether any segments reached the surface. New Zealanders reported seeing the spacecraft glowing orange as it passed eastwards.

Russian officials plan to determine the reasons behind the failure of the mission, considered as a major setback for the Russian agency. Vadim Lukashevich commented, “Five and half billion rubles and all the hopes of Russian space science for a revival, today burn up without any glory in the earth’s atmosphere.”

However, until now, scientists could never be certain that these compounds were native to the meteorites or if they were simply contamination from the terrestrial environment in which they landed. To this end, researchers analyzed eleven different organic-rich meteorites, called carbonaceous chondrites, for the presence of nucleobases and found that three of these molecules are very rare on Earth.

Additionally, none of these nucleobases were found in the soil or ice in close proximity to where the meteorites were found. This led the researchers to conclude that it was likely that these molecules were extraterrestrial in origin which could mean that life on Earth may have originally been seeded by such material.

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Scientists hope that the spacecraft’s collection of instruments will shed light on the origins of the planet. Researchers believe that Jupiter may also hold clues to the formation and evolution of the early solar system because it is the largest and oldest planet. Additionally, the data gathered from Juno may help scientists to understand early planetary processes occurring in other star systems beyond our own.

Juno will travel roughly 1,740 million miles (2,800 million kilometers) over the course of its five-year journey.

Paul Crowther, professor of astrophysics at the University of Sheffield, led the team of researchers that discovered the star. The team used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, and data archived from the Hubble Space Telescope. The newly discovered star, designated R136a1, was discovered in the R136 star cluster.

The researchers estimate that the current mass of the star is about 265 solar masses, and could have been about 320 solar masses just after its birth.

“Unlike humans,” says Crowther, “these stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age. Being a little over a million years old, the most extreme star R136a1 is already middle-aged, and has undergone an intense weight loss programme, shedding a fifth of its initial mass over that time, or more than 50 solar masses.”

Astronomers not involved in the discovery, while still impressed, warn of the small possibility that the team could have mistaken two relatively close stars for one large one.

“What they’re characterizing as a single massive star,” Mark Krumholz told the Associated Press, “could in fact be a binary system too close to be resolved.” Krumholz is an astronomer at the University of California.

Another astronomer, Phillip Massey from the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, also warns that this may be the case. Massey explained that the star’s weight had been inferred using scientific models that were subject to change.

The R136 star cluster, the star’s location, is in the Tarantula nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy about 165,000 light-years away. The Large Magellanic Cloud, located between the constellations Dorado and Mensa, is visible as a faint cloud in the southern hemisphere. Astronomers are still struggling to understand how these stars form.

“Either they were born so big or smaller stars merged together to produce them,” Crowther explained. The researchers believe that the stellar heavyweight record could be held by this star for quite some time. Crowther elaborates: “Owing to the rarity of these monsters, I think it is unlikely that this new record will be broken any time soon.”

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The study was conducted by an international team of researchers led by Professor Eric Jullo at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The researchers used data from the Hubble Space Telescope showing the way that light was distorted, known as a gravitational lens, from a large galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to estimate the amount of dark energy to be about three quarters of the universe.

Dark energy is a completely invisible force that is constantly acting upon the universe. Its existence is known only because of its effects on the expansion of the universe.

As the universe expands and cools, the temperature will approach absolute zero.
Jullo says that scientists can now say, for the first time, that the universe “will continue to accelerate and the universe will expand forever”.

Scientists have discovered landforms littered across the moon’s surface called lobate scarps that have apparently resulted from the moon’s shrinking very slowly. These scarps were found all over the moon and appear to be minimally weathered, indicating that the geologic events that created them were fairly recent. This theory contradicts the claim that the moon is completely devoid of geologic activity.

Over the past billion years, about a quarter of the moon’s 4.5 billion-year lifespan, it has shrunk about 200 meters (700 feet) in diameter. The scarps that are thought to have resulted from the contraction scenario were first identified near the lunar equator by cameras aboard the Apollo moon missions of the early 1970′s.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently photographed similar landforms in other locations on the moon, further supporting the theory that Earth’s closest neighbor in space may in fact be shrinking.

The concept, however, is not a recent one. Scientists know that the moon’s core was once very hot, causing it to expand. As the core cools, the moon naturally begins to contract.

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