SpaceX Reveals The Falcon Heavy, The Most Powerful Rocket Since The Mighty Saturn V

by Matt Burns
from http://www.crunchgear.com/

SpaceX teased the world last week with some rocket pr0n that hinted that the company was finally ready to reveal its Falcon Heavy mega rocket. Well, that’s what the company did minutes ago in a Washington DC press conference. World, meet the Falcon Heavy. She might take us back to the Moon.






The Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful and capable launch platform. At 52,000 kg the payload capability is nearly double that of the current heavy lifter, the Space Shuttle and its 24,400 kg carrying capacity. This super strength is thanks to a three banks of nine engines that combine to generate 17 MN (3,800,000 lb) of thrust at liftoff. SpaceX claims that the three core design makes the Falcon Heavy as powerful as a three stage rocket. (Like the Saturn V) Cross-feeding propellant from the side boosters leaves the center core the majority of the fuel even after the two boosters separate. This function is optional and can be disabled for lower-mass launches.

While impressive, it’s still half as powerful as the 44-year old Saturn V’s 7,648,000 lb record. Still, SpaceX’s CEO, Elon Musk stated that it’s powerful enough to send man back to the Moon and it very well do just that since the the Falcon Heavy complies with NASA’s human rating standards. The Falcon Heavy is expected to blast off for the first time in 2012. Space just got exciting again. [SpaceX]

This Breathtaking Saturn Video Is Exactly What Everyone’s Soul Needs Right Now

Jesus Diaz — 
From: http://gizmodo.com/

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.
Double click to enlarge


After all the horror we are seeing these days, after the continuous bad news, I think it's time for some mind- and spirit-cleansing beauty. Something to remind us that humans and nature can sometimes produce awe-inspiring things. Like this video.

The Cassini spacecraft reached Saturn in 2004, sending the clearest images of the most striking planet in the Solar System. Working at home, Stephen Van Vuuren used those photos to create the most hypnotizing space film I've seen. There is no CGI and no 3D models in these images. Just images from NASA. Jump to 0:56 for the final result of his work, so far.

Stephen took the approach and orbit photos, painstakingly cropping, scaling, and putting them together in an IMAX-quality film. Tens of thousands 5,600,000-pixel video frames in full 32-bit natural color. He is still working on it. When he's done, I want to see this big. [Thanks Karl!]

The World Would Be Better If Everyone Watched This Video

From: http://gizmodo.com/

If every person on our blue Earth watched this video, the world would be a much better place. At least for a few minutes. Listen closely to Carl Sagan's words till the end. It won't fail to get you teary.-JD

The spacecraft was a long way from home.

I thought it would be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel hardly distinguishable from the other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.

It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos—but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last for decades to come.

So, here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets in a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world; but it's just an accident of geometry and optics. There is no sign of humans in this picture: not our reworking of the Earth's surface; not our machines; not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalisms is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds, humans are inconsequential: a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings; thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines; every hunter and forager; every hero and coward; every creator and destroyer of civilizations; every king and peasant, every young couple in love; every mother and father; hopeful child; inventor and explorer; every teacher of morals; every corrupt politician; every supreme leader; every superstar; every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings; how eager they are to kill one another; how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we've ever known.

The pale blue dot.

This is an excerpt from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. It talks about the photo of the same name, Pale Blue Dot, taken by Voyager I on February 14, 1990.

The short film was produced by David Fu. Thanks to our friend Alex Pasternack—from Motherboard—for pointing us to this amazing video.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope Discovers Largest Ring Around Saturn

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted a nearly invisible ring around Saturn -- the largest of the giant planet's many rings. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Keck)

ScienceDaily (Oct. 7, 2009) — NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn -- by far the largest of the giant planet's many rings.

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The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.

Saturn's newest halo is thick, too -- its vertical height is about 20 times the diameter of the planet. It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the ring.

"This is one supersized ring," said Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. "If you could see the ring, it would span the width of two full moons' worth of sky, one on either side of Saturn." Verbiscer; Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, College Park; and Michael Skrutskie, of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, are authors of a paper about the discovery to be published online tomorrow by the journal Nature.

An artist's concept of the newfound ring is online at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/spitzer-20091007a.html .

The ring itself is tenuous, made up of a thin array of ice and dust particles. Spitzer's infrared eyes were able to spot the glow of the band's cool dust. The telescope, launched in 2003, is currently 107 million kilometers (66 million miles) from Earth in orbit around the sun.

The discovery may help solve an age-old riddle of one of Saturn's moons. Iapetus has a strange appearance -- one side is bright and the other is really dark, in a pattern that resembles the yin-yang symbol. The astronomer Giovanni Cassini first spotted the moon in 1671, and years later figured out it has a dark side, now named Cassini Regio in his honor. A stunning picture of Iapetus taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft is online at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08384 .

Saturn's newest addition could explain how Cassini Regio came to be. The ring is circling in the same direction as Phoebe, while Iapetus, the other rings and most of Saturn's moons are all going the opposite way. According to the scientists, some of the dark and dusty material from the outer ring moves inward toward Iapetus, slamming the icy moon like bugs on a windshield.

"Astronomers have long suspected that there is a connection between Saturn's outer moon Phoebe and the dark material on Iapetus," said Hamilton. "This new ring provides convincing evidence of that relationship."

Verbiscer and her colleagues used Spitzer's longer-wavelength infrared camera, called the multiband imaging photometer, to scan through a patch of sky far from Saturn and a bit inside Phoebe's orbit. The astronomers had a hunch that Phoebe might be circling around in a belt of dust kicked up from its minor collisions with comets -- a process similar to that around stars with dusty disks of planetary debris. Sure enough, when the scientists took a first look at their Spitzer data, a band of dust jumped out.

The ring would be difficult to see with visible-light telescopes. Its particles are diffuse and may even extend beyond the bulk of the ring material all the way in to Saturn and all the way out to interplanetary space. The relatively small numbers of particles in the ring wouldn't reflect much visible light, especially out at Saturn where sunlight is weak.

"The particles are so far apart that if you were to stand in the ring, you wouldn't even know it," said Verbiscer.

Spitzer was able to sense the glow of the cool dust, which is only about 80 Kelvin (minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit). Cool objects shine with infrared, or thermal radiation; for example, even a cup of ice cream is blazing with infrared light. "By focusing on the glow of the ring's cool dust, Spitzer made it easy to find," said Verbiscer.

These observations were made before Spitzer ran out of coolant in May and began its "warm" mission.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The multiband imaging photometer for Spitzer was built by Ball Aerospace Corporation, Boulder, Colo., and the University of Arizona, Tucson. Its principal investigator is George Rieke of the University of Arizona.

For additional images relating to the ring discovery and more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

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Adapted from materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Four of Saturn's moons parade by their parent

17-Mar-2009: A new Hubble image shows four of Saturn's moons circling the ringed planet On 24 February 2009, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured a photo sequence of four moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet. The moons, from far left to right, are the white icy moons Enceladus and Dione, the large orange moon Titan, and icy Mimas. Due to the angle of the Sun, they are each preceded by their own shadow. These rare moon transits only happen when the tilt of Saturn's ring plane is nearly "edge on" as seen from the Earth. Saturn's rings will be perfectly edge on to our line of sight on 10 August and 4 September 2009. Unfortunately, Saturn will be too close to the Sun to be seen by viewers on Earth at that time. This "ring plane crossing" occurs every 14-15 years. In 1995-96 Hubble witnessed the previous ring plane crossing, as well as many moon transits, and helped to discover several new moons of Saturn. Early 2009 was a favourable time for viewers with small telescopes to watch moon and shadow transits crossing the face of Saturn. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, crossed Saturn on four separate occasions: 24 January, 9 February, 24 February and 12 March, although not all events were visible from all locations on Earth. Italian Galileo Galilei — often referred to as the father of astronomy — was the first to observe Saturn through a telescope in 1610. Dutch mathematician and astronomer Christian Huygens discovered Titan in 1655 and, 350 years later, the ESA probe named for him touched down on Titan (on 14 January 2005), giving the world its first views of the surface of the mysterious, icy world. Giovanni Domenico Cassini, a French/Italian astronomer, discovered Dione (in addition to others) and the German-born Englishman, William Herschel, discovered Mimas and Enceladus. These pictures were taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on 24 February 2009, when Saturn was at a distance of roughly 1.25 billion kilometres from Earth. Hubble can see details as small as 300 kilometres across on Saturn. The dark band running across the face of the planet slightly above the rings is the shadow of the rings cast on the planet. Notes for editors: The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA. Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Links: NASA's release Contacts: Colleen Sharkey Hubble/ESA, Garching, Germany Tel: +49-89-3200-6306 Cell: +49-151-153-73591 E-mail: csharkey@eso.org Ray Villard Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md. Tel: +1-410-338-4514 E-mail: villard@stsci.edu Keith Noll Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md. Tel: +1-410-338-1828 E-mail: noll@stsci.edu

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On Saturn’s Moon Titan, It’s Raining Methane

Imagine a world where the average daytime temperature is -179°C, and torrential rains of liquid methane fall from the skies, forming vast but shallow pools that cover an area larger than the Great Lakes [ScienceNOW Daily News].

That’s the vision of the Saturnian moon Titan provided by the NASA spacecraft Cassini, which has been exploring Saturn and its satellites since 2004. In the latest findings, Cassini scientists have determined that Titan has seasonal weather patterns in which fierce storms fill up the methane lakes. “We see clouds that behave very much as clouds on Earth, and we see evidence of flooding on the surface, just as a lot of people in the [U.S.] Midwest saw last year” [National Geographic News], researcher Elizabeth Turtle said.

The researchers compared images taken in July 2004 and June 2005, and spotted both low-lying clouds and newly formed dark areas representing lakes of hydrocarbons. But the source of the methane that rains down through Titan’s thick atmosphere is still something of a mystery, as the methane should be quickly broken down by UV radiation. According to the researchers, the source most likely lies beneath the surface of the moon. There may be volcanoes releasing plumes of methane, instead of lava, from the interior. That methane, a leftover from the primordial gas cloud that formed Titan, could be plentiful enough to sustain the rainy weather [ScienceNOW Daily News].

The transitory lakes, described in Geophysical Research Letters [subscription required], formed in the south during summer in Titan’s southern hemisphere. But the seasons are slowly shifting, and researchers hope to keep watching the moon to see how rainfall and lake formation are affected. Says researcher Tony DelGenio: “The longer we stay, the more we get to see the seasons progress…. A few years down the line, in 2015, 2016, and 2017—if we last that long—we may be able to see the northern summer” [National Geographic News]. Cassini completed its originally scheduled four-year mission last year, but is now engaged in an extended mission through 2010. Since the craft is still in good working order and since it continues to send back fascinating observations of the Saturnian system, researchers hope NASA will continue to fund it past the 2010 cut-off date.

Image: Space Science Institute/NASA/JPL

Spacecraft Passes Just 16 Miles From Surface Of Saturns Moon

By Chris Laker

These are the stunning images captured by the Cassini spacecraft as it headed towards Saturn's moon Enceladus before it made a daring dive just miles from the surface.

Travelling at 40,000MPH and just 82,000ft over the moon, the 'white-knuckle' flyby was the closest yet past any of Saturn's moons.

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This image was captured on Cassini's approach to the icy moon, 26,000 miles above the surface

Scientists are intrigued by the possibility that liquid water, perhaps even an ocean, exists beneath the surface of Enceladus.

To test their theory they sampled the composition of its water vapour geysers, which blast material 300 miles into space.

The team from Nasa will report detailed results from the flyby in November and early December.

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This image of Enceladus was taken 16,000 miles above the surface. The spacecraft passed just 16 miles from the moon at its closest point

Prior to the mission, Tamas Gambosi, a scientist at the University of Michigan said: 'One of the overarching scientific puzzles we are trying to understand is what happens to the gas and dust released from Enceladus.

'We know that Enceladus produces a few hundred kilograms per second of gas and dust and that this material is mainly water vapor and water ice.'

British planetary scientist Geraint Jones added it would be 'a white-knuckle pass.'

Four more Enceladus flybys are planned in the next two years, bringing the total number to seven during Cassini's extended Equinox mission.

The Enceladus geysers were discovered by Cassini in 2005. Since then, scientists have been intrigued about what powers them, because the moon is so tiny, roughly the width of Arizona at only 500 kilometers (310 miles) in diameter.

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The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft from NASA. Click enlarge for more detail

Cassini has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

Saturn is the sixth planet in our solar system, known for its golden glow and spectacular planetary rings.

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This picture, taken in 2006, shows the southern hemisphere of Enceladus. Many of the ancient craters remain pristine.

The most scientific interest in Saturn involves not the planet, but its moons, in particular the two largest , Titan and Enceladus.

A Cassini space probe sent to Titan's surface in 2004 revealed a world that looked a lot like home - a complex terrain of rivers, deserts scattered with dunes and lakes of liquid methane - the first open-body lakes to have been found anywhere other than Earth.

Scientists plan a further flyby of Enceladus at the end of the month, this time passing 122 miles from the surface.