"Heavy Metal! I found an iron meteorite on Mars" tweet from Curiosity

Dear readers and followers,

"Heavy Metal! I found an iron meteorite on Mars," Curiosity's handlers wrote on the mission's Twitter page.

Actually, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has discovered its first meteorite on the Red Planet, and it's no puny space rock.The new found Mars meteorite, which scientist have named "Lebanon," is nearly 2 meters wide and made of iron. Photos of the meteorite taken by Curiosity also revealed a smaller companion nearby, which is now dubbed "Lebanon B." "That 'Lebanon' is huge, almost 2 meters," said Guy Webster from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. 

While NASA released a detailed photo of the Lebanon meteorites Tuesday, July 15th, the Curiosity rover actually discovered the space rocks on May 25th. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Webster said Curiosity also found a third meteorite at the same time it spotted the Lebanon rocks. In a raw, unprocessed photo from Curiosity, the third meteorite, which is also about 2 meters wide, can be seen just beyond the closer Lebanon meteorites. Curiosity snapped detailed photos of the main Lebanon meteorite using its high-resolution Chem-Cam and Remote Micro-Imager cameras. The images revealed strange angular cavities in the surface of the rock.

Altogether, the three meteorites are the first space rocks on Mars discovered by the Curiosity rover since it landed on the Red Planet in August 2012, Webster added.

"One possible explanation is that they resulted from preferential erosion along crystalline boundaries within the metal of the rock," NASA officials wrote in a statement. "Another possibility is that these cavities once contained olivine crystals, which can be found in a rare type of stony-iron meteorites called pallasites, thought to have been formed near the core-mantle boundary within an asteroid."

On Aug. 5th, Curiosity will celebrate its second Earth-year anniversary on Mars. Since landing in 2012, the rover has found evidence that Mars could have been habitable for primitive life, a major mission goal, and has been making its way toward the huge Mount Sharp, which rises from the center of its Gale Crater landing site.

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ISS data communication boosted by the laser OPALS

Dear followers and readers,

The bandwidth speed of the communications between the International Space Station and Earth is a real bottleneck for the scientific experiments. But NASA decided to fix this problem. The slowness of capturing data from ISS is about to go into serious overdrive with a new laser communication experiment set which will be launch to ISS this weekend. The experiment gear is called OPALS for Optical Payload for Laser Science

Credit: OPALS - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

OPALS transfers the video data from ISS to the ground receiver at JPL's Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory (OCTL) in Wrightwood, California. As the ISS travels across the sky, a laser beacon is transmitted from the ground telescope to the payload on ISS and tracked. The main existing deep space missions send back 200k to 400k bits of information per second. OPALS will send information by laser beam rather than radio wave, demonstrating a speed of up to 50 megabits per second. Future deep space optical communication systems should reach up to one gigabit per second.

The OPALS module will be sent up to the space station aboard the cargo Dragon from the private company Space X. Its launch is planned next Sunday, March 16th.

Credit: NASA 

Stay tuned for the space launch of OPALS module

[Update] The Dragon launch was postponed to March 30. Stay tuned 

New potential hazardous asteroid discovered by NASA

Dear followers,

for this beginning of 2014, +NASA revealed the discovery of a news potential hazardous asteroid, called 2013 YP139. The asteroid was at a distance of 0.235 astronomical units from Earth by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer from NASA. Its size is estimated around 650 meters.  It orbits the Sun in an elliptical orbit along the invariable plane and is currently 42 million kilometers away and is expected to come within 490,000 kilometers of our dear Earth planet, slightly beyond the orbit of the Moon. However, because of some potential uncertainties and this close proximity, the 2013 YP139 asteroid has classified as a potential threat.

Credit: +NASA / +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

Stay tuned 

Curiosity Mars rover is back after a power glitch

Dear followers,

The NASA's space rover Curiosity which explores the Mars's land for 16 months has stopped the whole of the science operations and driving during six days. Actually, an electrical power system glitch had induced a system dysfunction on the space rover. Fortunately, the problem has now been resolved.

This dysfunction is the second trouble observed on the martian rover after an other one which has been observed and which has been assigned to radiation effects. For the moment the cause of this dysfunction has still not been found but the +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers are working on it. “We made a list of potential causes, and then determined which we could cross off the list, one by one,” said rover electrical engineer Rob Zimmerman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California.

Credits: +NASA 

For the moment, Curiosity has already accomplished its primary science goal of discovering a habitable zone at her landing site. This kind of dysfunction could be critical for the Curiosity mission, but the martian rover is safe now.

In the next months, the Curiosity rover will be join by the Maven spacecraft sent by NASA two weeks ago.

Stay tuned for the next news about the red planet discoveries.

Source: NASA

Huge plume of radiations induced by a black hole

Credits: +NASA / +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

Description and details in French here 

Maps of dangerous asteroids for Earth

Credits: +NASA / +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory - Caltech

Voyager1 leaves the Solar system

Dear followers,

yesterday +NASA announced a huge step of the history of space conquest. Actually, after 36 years of flight, the spacecraft +Voyager 1 sent Cap Canaveral, has left the solar system and move to the interstellar space. The spacecraft perform a flight of 125 AU. One AU is the distance from the sun to the Earth, which is about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers. The spacecraft went to the humankind's most distance than ever !

Credits: +NASA / +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

The Voyager-1 spacecraft was built and continue to be operated by +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory  in Pasadena, California. This mission is a part of NASA's Heliophysics System Observatory, supported by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate at +NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Source

The short list of the landing of the next Mission InSight on Mars surface selected

Dear followers,

+NASA has announced that the number of potential landing site for the next mission to the surface of Mars is now focus on four locations. After the current success of Curiosity and its one news for research on the red planet, the mission InSight ( Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is scheduled to launch in March 2016 and land on Mars's surface six months later. 

Credits: +NASA / +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

"This mission's science goals are not related to any specific location on Mars because we're studying the planet as a whole, down to its core," said Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory . For this main reasons, the  "mission safety and survival are what drive our criteria for a landing site."

During its mission, InSight rover will deploy a seismometer on the Mars' surface and will use its radio for scientific measurements.

Credits: +NASA / +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

+NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory  manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The French space agency, +CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales), and the German Aerospace Center are contributing instruments to the mission. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is building the spacecraft.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/insight/news/insight20130904.html#.Ui1kktJFBpD

Saturn taken by the spacecraft Cassini for Solstice mission

Credits: +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

Amazing video of 2 Mars moons captured by Mars Curiosity

Credits: +NASA / +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

The next NASA's spacecraft to Mars arrived at Kennedy Space Center

Dear follower,

After Curiosity, the rover sent to the red planet by +NASA to explore the land of Mars, the American space agency, works on a new spacecraft : MAVEN. This spacecraft should be sent before the end of this year.

Credits: +NASA / Tim Jacobs

The new Mars spacecraft called MAVEN for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution arrived on August 3rd at the +NASA agency at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. MAVEN was flown to Florida for launch processing from Buckley Air Force base near the +Lockheed Martin facility in Littleton, Colorado, where the spacecraft was built.

The next Mars mission should lift off on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in November 2013. The travel of the spacecraft should be around 10 month. This mission will be the first one dedicated to studying Mars' upper atmosphere and the scientists of +NASA and +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory hope to find traces of the ancient environment of the red planet.

Anniversary of Curiosity : 1 year on Mars

Credits: +NASA 

Curiosity Mars rover tracks viewed from orbiter

Credits: +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

Ladder-like Ring around Saturn

Credits: +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

9 Months for Curiosity on Mars in 1 minute

Dear follower,

today, I would talk to you about Curiosity, the +NASA rover launched in November 2011 from Earth and landed on Mars in August 2012, yes, 9 months ago !! it's a very long time. After some troubles few weeks ago, and a cut of communications, the Curiosity rover is still working and sending interesting data by exploring the Mars surface.

Today, I would propose you a time lapse video of the 9 months of Curiosity rover summarized in 1 minutes. This work has been performed using data from +NASA and +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Credit: Karl Sanford

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Asteroid 1998 QE2 close to Earth on May 31th

Dead followers,

next Friday, on May 31th 2013, the asteroid 1998 QE2 will be close to Earth, closer than about 5.8 million kilometers, or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the Moon. The asteroid was discovered on August 19th 1998, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program near Socorro, New Mexico. 

The Asteroid 1998 QE2 will be an outstanding radar imaging target for the Goldstone and Arecibo telescope in order to obtain a series of high-resolution images that could reveal a wealth of surface features. The closest approach of the asteroid occurs on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. Pacific (4:59 p.m. Eastern / 20:59 UTC).

"Whenever an asteroid approaches this closely, it provides an important scientific opportunity to study it in detail to understand its size, shape, rotation, surface features, and what they can tell us about its origin. We will also use new radar measurements of the asteroid's distance and velocity to improve our calculation of its orbit and compute its motion farther into the future than we could otherwise." said Lance Benner , the principal investigator for the Goldstone radar observations from +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory  in Pasadena, Calif.

+NASA  places a high priority on tracking asteroids and protecting our home planet from them. In fact, the U.S. has the most robust and productive survey and detection program for discovering near-Earth objects. Last year, the NEO budget was increased from $6 million to $20 million.

In 2016, +NASA  will launch a robotic probe, called the OSIRIS-REx to the asteroid (101955) Bennu. Aside from monitoring potential threats, the study of asteroids and comets enables a valuable opportunity to learn more about the origins of our solar system, the source of water on Earth, and even the origin of organic molecules that lead to the development of life. 

+NASA  recently announced developing a first-ever mission to identify, capture and relocate an asteroid for human exploration. Using game-changing technologies advanced by the Administration, this mission would mark an unprecedented technological achievement that raises the bar of what humans can do in space. Capturing and redirecting an asteroid will integrate the best of NASA's science, technology and human exploration capabilities and draw on the innovation of America's brightest scientists and engineers. 

More information about asteroid radar research is at: http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/ 

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Huge hurricane on Saturn, first time in color

The spacecraft Cassini, sent by +NASA  has provided scientists of the +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory  the first close-up, visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling around Saturn's north pole. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of +NASA , the +European Space Agency, ESA and the Italian Space Agency.
High-resolution pictures and video indicated the hurricane's eye is about 1,250 miles wide, 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth.

(Credits: +NASA )

D-3 before the Mars Curiosity comeback !

As we said previously, +NASA and +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers can not anymore communicate with Mars +Curiosity due to the Sun.
However, this problem will take the end soon ! Actually in 3 days (the May 1st) the engineers and scientists will be able to receive and send data to the Mars rover !!!

The Sun stops the communications between Earth and the Mars rover Curiosity

The Curiosity rover begins its four week break today as the Sun moves between Mars and the Earth blocking communications between scientists and the robot.
For most of April, +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory  engineers from NASA and academics from the University of Leicester in UK will be unable to send commands to the rover due to solar interference from the Sun.

Be back soon Curiosity, we miss you !