IT Masala

An astronaut glove stitched together on a Maine engineer's dining room table won a cool $200,000 Thursday in a NASA competition.

via [ space ] 

wow..what a figure !! its awesome..That's what makes Gliese special

Some Facts : 

- Like Earth, it is a small planet — 1.5 times Earth's diameter.

- Planets of that size are not blobs of gas but rocky.

- It also orbits its parent sun at a distance where liquid water could exist (the estimated temperature is between 0 and 40 degrees).

- And liquid water could mean life.

- Maybe the first potentially habitable planet.

- We don't know if it's got an ozone shield or anything like that.

"There's probably millions or billions of them out there, but this is the first one to be found," said Malcolm Walter, director of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University. "I don't think we know enough about it yet. It's still early days. I don't think we can say anything about interstellar life."

via [ the age ] 

European astronomers have spotted what they say is the most Earth-like planet yet outside our solar system, with balmy temperatures that could support water and, potentially, life. They have not directly seen the planet, orbiting a red dwarf star called Gliese 581.

"This one is the first one that is at the same time probably rocky, with water, and in a zone close to the star where the water could exist in liquid form," said Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, who led the study.

About the Planet :

"We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius (32 to 104 degrees F), and water would thus be liquid."

Most of the 200 or so planets that have been spotted outside this solar system have been gas giants like Jupiter. But this one is small.

"Its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth's radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky, like our Earth, or covered with oceans," Udry said in a telephone interview.

It appears to have a mass five times that of Earth's. Gliese 581 is among the 100 closest stars to Earth, just 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra.

via [ Reuters ]

Note : A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles. 

Hubble celebrates its 17th anniversary and gives the world a big present—a 29,566 x 14,321 pixel image (500 MB TIFF image) of the Carina Nebula*. For those who don't feel like downloading the entire TIFF image, there is a JPEG available for download from the same site; however, it is still nearly 250MB in size(pretty big).  If you click on the image shown here in this article, you will get a  download-friendly version of the spectacular image. 

This painterly picture brings the total number of images that Hubble has taken since 1990 to nearly 500,000.

(See a photo gallery of Hubble's top ten discoveries.)

To date, the telescope has made nearly 800,000 observations of more than 25,000 celestial objects and has traveled 2.4 billion miles (3.8 billion kilometers)—the equivalent of flying to Saturn and back.

* Note: The link to the image is NOT the full size image, but a page where you can download it or wallpapers of the image. The image Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Now watch this space below for some unique viewing experience !! 

Observe the love for open source:  (pretty amazing observation )

MathRockBrock writes on arstechnica article :

Anybody else notice the Firefox logo floating out there in Image 7, "The Carina Nebula from the ground"?

Note: First image unedited JPEG (except for the box). Second image cropped and resized only from the full-size NASA TIF. Third image from my desktop.

The Department of Defense project to test Internet routing in space (IRIS) will be managed by Intelsat General, and the payload will convert to commercial use once testing has been completed. The IRIS project is one of seven projects — out of hundreds of applicants — funded and announced in fiscal 2007 as a Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD) by the Department of Defense.

Intelsat is the first commercial satellite company to be awarded a JCTD Program. The IRIS JCTD is a three-year program that allows the DoD to collaborate with Intelsat General and its industry team to demonstrate and assess the utility of the IRIS capability.

Cisco, the global networking leader based in San Jose, CA, will provide commercial IP networking software for the on-board router. In addition, SEAKR Engineering Inc. of Denver, CO, will manufacture the space-hardened router and integrate it into the IRIS payload.

via [ playfuls ] 

Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams will attempt to do something 210 miles above Earth that no other astronaut has ever done. She will run the Boston Marathon while in orbit.

The 41-year-old plans to run the 26.2-mile race on a treadmill onboard the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday at 7:30 p.m. IST as this year's marathon begins in Boston at precisely the same hour.

Race organisers say this will be their first satellite venture, and they are thrilled about it. "Suni running 26.2 miles in space on Patriots' Day is really a tribute to the thousands of marathoners who are running here on Earth. She is pioneering new frontiers in the running world," said Jack Fleming of the Boston Athletic Association.

A space suit worn by astronaut Deke Slayton is seen at the Alameda, the nation's largest museum dedicated to Latino culture and art, in San Antonio, Wednesday, April 11, 2007. The new museum opens to the public Friday. Photo Credit: AP Photo.

via [ dnaindia ]

Great News ….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.

Jessy Cowan-Sharp and Robert Schingler set up CosmosCode to help NASA develop open-source software for space exploration.

The program was launched quietly last year under NASA's CoLab entrepreneur outreach program, created by Robert Schingler, 28, and Jessy Cowan-Sharp, 25, of 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.

"NASA is recognizing the value of free and open-source software in other sectors," said Cowan-Sharp, a contractor at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California. "CosmosCode is going one step further by allowing NASA scientists to begin a software project in the public domain, leveraging the true value of open-source software by creating an active community of volunteers."

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.

via [ wired ] 

Radio waves produced during solar flare eruptions on the Sun can cripple the Global Positioning System (GPS) and other communication technologies here on Earth, scientists say.

The finding, announced today at the first Space Weather Enterprise Forum in Washington D.C., was confirmed during an exceptionally strong solar eruption last December that produced 20,000 times more radio emissions than the Sun does normally.

“This solar radio bursts occurred during the solar minimum, yet produced as much as 10 times more radio noise than the previous record,” said Dale Gary, a physicist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. “This was enough to swamp GPS receivers over the entire sunlit side of Earth.” 

“The size and timing of this burst were completely unexpected and the largest ever detected,” said Anthea Coster of the MIT Haystack Observatory. “We do not know how often we can expect solar radio bursts of this size or even larger.” 

via [ space.com ] 

Here’s your chance to name something much bigger than a street after yourself.

TierneyLab hereby promises to name Saturn’s mysterious hexagon after the reader who comes up with the most entertaining explanation for this 15,000-mile wide feature at the planet’s north pole. NASA says it looks like clouds are whipping around a hexagaonal race track.

This atmospheric feature, first spotted in 1980, turns out to be more than a transient gap in the clouds. Last year it was spotted again by the the Cassini spacecraft, whose infrared spectrometer captured the first full image of the entire hexagon.

Here’s NASA’s summary of expert opinion:

“This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.”

The hexagon is similar to Earth’s polar vortex, which has winds blowing in a circular pattern around the polar region. On Saturn, the vortex has a hexagonal rather than circular shape. The hexagon is nearly 25,000 kilometers (15,000 miles) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it.

The new images taken in thermal-infrared light show the hexagon extends much deeper down into the atmosphere than previously expected, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) below the cloud tops. A system of clouds lies within the hexagon. The clouds appear to be whipping around the hexagon like cars on a racetrack.

“It’s amazing to see such striking differences on opposite ends of Saturn’s poles,” said Bob Brown, team leader of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, University of Arizona, Tucson. “At the south pole we have what appears to be a hurricane with a giant eye, and at the north pole of Saturn we have this geometric feature, which is completely different.”

After reading all this ..what NASA and the lab need is some creativity. So come on guys this magnificent looking structure maybe named after you.So come on give some convincing explanations and theories and also name it.

via [ Nasa ] 

A total lunar eclipse occured early on March four and was visible all over India.

The Moon’s eclipse began at 3:00 am and enter totality at 4.14 am with the ‘greatest eclipse’ occurring at around 4.50 am.The total eclipse ended by 5.27 am and the Moon emerged at around 7.53 am.

The celestial phenomenon was visible from the Arctic, Asia, barring the eastern part, Europe, including British Isles, Africa, South America and eastern parts of Central and North America.

We were very lucky to get to see this wonderful celestial event.I was up at 3.00am in the morning ( normally i don't get up before 7.00am in the morning - only to enjoy this event i had got up early.) and i can say it was a cherishing event altogether !! Those who missed it might not get another chance to see such wonderful event happening and visible to the naked eye.

image courtesy : Deccan Herald Newspaper