Free Republic

A photo from Cassini shows sunlight reflecting from a giant lake of methane on the northern half of Saturn's moon Titan. (CNN) -- NASA scientists revealed Friday a first-of-its-kind image from space showing reflecting sunlight from a lake on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. It's the first visual "smoking gun" evidence of liquid on the northern hemisphere of the moon, scientists said, and the first-ever photo from another world showing a "specular reflection" -- which is reflection from a liquid surface. Jaumann said he was surprised when he first saw the photos transmitting from Cassini, orbiting Saturn about a billion...

FYI, The NASA press release below refers to 'holiday' or 'seasons' greetings six times. No mention of Christmas, of course. [comment deleted]! In a bizarre historical turnabout, religious activity on the space station has now become almost entirely dominated by the Russians. They fly icons blessed by priests (http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=6673) Photos: http://hochu.vkosmos.ru/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/ikona.jpeg and http://www.svet-valaama.ru/photoalbom/2006_05_icon_from_space/2006_05_icon_from_space_01.jpg Also http://www.interfax-religion.ru/img/2308.jpg I haven't seen anything remotely similar from the American side. What have I missed? For the next manned launch this Sunday, also expect Russian Orthodox priests from the newly-built church in Baykonur (news story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10729300) to bless the rocket and the crew. File photo: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Mp59h1-TVgE/SsKiot99hvI/AAAAAAAAAnA/1QV6t9vIfrs/s400/Best+Soyuz+Bless.jpg...

PARIS — European Space Agency (ESA) governments on Dec. 17 gave final approval to a two-part Mars exploration program to be conducted with NASA, confirming their commitment to spend 850 million euros ($1.23 billion) on missions in 2016 and 2018, ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain said.

WASHINGTON — NASA Administrator Charles Bolden will meet with U.S. President Barack Obama Dec. 16 to discuss options for the future of manned spaceflight activities and investments, according to the president’s daily schedule released by the White House. The meeting is slated to occur at 3:05 p.m. today in the Oval Office. Bolden and senior administration officials have spent the past several months mulling the findings of a blue-ribbon panel that found the agency’s Constellation program, a five-year-old effort to replace the space shuttle with rockets and spacecraft optimized for the Moon, is incompatible with NASA’s budget. The panel, lead...

Crescent Neptune and Triton Credit: Voyager 2, NASA Explanation: Gliding silently through the outer Solar System, the Voyager 2 spacecraft camera captured Neptune and Triton together in crescent phase in 1989. The above picture of the gas giant planet and its cloudy moon was taken from behind just after closest approach. It could not have been taken from Earth because Neptune never shows a crescent phase to sunward Earth. The unusual vantage point also robs Neptune of its familiar blue hue, as sunlight seen from here is scattered forward, and so is reddened like the setting Sun. Neptune is...

The giant gold and silver satellite glittered against the black sky as space shuttle Atlantis closed in on it from below. Commander Hoot Gibson and pilot Guy Gardner flew the approach, while mission specialist Mike Mullane, at the other end of the flight deck, readied the shuttle’s robot arm for a capture. Downstairs in the airlock, mission specialists Jerry Ross and Bill Shepherd waited in their spacesuits for Gibson’s order to go outside and attempt a rescue. The mission of STS-27 had been to deploy the first in a series of new spy satellites that used radar to observe ground...

Dec. 11, 2009: There's a storm brewing -- a storm of information, that is, in climate and environmental research. People are wading through the turbulence, trying to make sense of it all. At the eye of the storm is a unique new web site called Climate One-Stop (http://climateonestop.net). "It's a 'calm spot' where scientists, decision-makers, nonprofit workers, and officials can find all the latest research," says Dan Irwin of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "We unveiled the site at this week's United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen."

WASHINGTON — Congress and the White House have signaled that they envision sharply different futures for NASA and its manned space mission. At an aerospace luncheon, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said President Barack Obama wants the agency to embrace “more international cooperation” after the space-shuttle era ends in 2010 and hinted that its Constellation moon-rocket program could see major changes. But hours earlier, congressional appropriators reached a different conclusion, approving legislative language declaring that any change to Constellation, which aims to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 but is running well behind schedule, must first get the approval of...

Russia has reneged on an agreement to deliver a total of 10 kilograms of plutonium-238 to the United States in 2010 and 2011 and is insisting on a new deal for the costly material vital to NASA’s deep space exploration plans. The move follows the U.S. Congress’ denial of President Barack Obama’s request for $30 million in 2010 to permit the Department of Energy to begin the painstaking process of restarting domestic production of plutonium-238. Bringing U.S. nuclear laboratories back on line to produce the isotope is expected to cost at least $150 million and take six years to seven...

Climategate may be just the tip of the global-warming iceberg according to the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, which says the next weather-science scandal may erupt right here in the United States. For nearly three years CEI, a free-market, public-interest organization, has pursued a series of Freedom of Information Act Requests intended to force NASA's climate-science division to hand over e-mails it says could reflect the same sort of pro-warming bias seen in the recent e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University. One reason NASA's unresponsiveness is drawing attention: For years, the CRU stonewalled a request...

The first thing one must understand about the global warming agenda is that it has nothing to do with saving the earth from destruction and although there is validity in the science of climate change for the study of cyclical patterns in weather and temperature, the theory that the earth is being destroyed by man made greenhouse gases is pure nonsense. The recent "Climategate" scandal in the global warming community has shown that. They have been manipulating data for years in order to advance their theory and ignoring any science that says different. What they have been very successful in...

What's become known as "Climategate" may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn't honor his Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors. "I assume that what is there is highly damaging," says Horner, who suspects, based on the public record, the same type of data fudging, manipulation and suppression that has occurred at Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU)....

After 30 days of data reduction, Ares I-X engineers continue to find fairly close correlation between their computer models and the flight performance of the test vehicle, which was the tallest rocket ever launched. Flight-control algorithms developed for the operational vehicle "worked extremely well," said NASA's Marshall Smith, systems engineering and integration (SE&I) manager for Ares I-X, and the flight data in general validated the computer models being used to design Ares I. "I, personally, from SE&I, am very, very pleased with the performance of our (guidance, navigation and control) system; the algorithms that we're testing for Ares I worked...

In an apparent set back for secret official efforts to announce the existence of extraterrestrial life, the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) has just closed its UFO desk. After 50 years of having an official reporting mechanism in place for public sightings of UFOs, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defence stated that the funds could be better used for the Afghanistan war. What is the impact of the British MOD decision to close its UFO desk? Why was such an announcement made now given that only a trivial amount of public funds (44,000 pounds/US$73,000 a year) will be saved...

It's been a long wait—in some ways, more than 50 years—but in April 2010, the U.S. Air Force is scheduled to launch an Atlas V booster from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the newest U.S. spacecraft, the unmanned X-37, to orbit. The X-37 embodies the Air Force's desire for an operational spaceplane, a wish that dates to the 1950s, the era of the rocket-powered X-15 and X-20. In other ways, though, the X-37 will be picking up where another U.S. spaceplane, NASA's space shuttle, leaves off.

The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as...

Science: For two years, our space agency has refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has repeatedly corrected its climate figures. A leading researcher threatens to sue to find more inconvenient truths. What's become known as "Climate-Gate" may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn't honor his FOI requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors. "I assume that what is there is highly...

The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data. Chris Horner... said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s. "I assume that what is there...

Not all of the climate change Hoaxers are members of the CSU in England, the other major "research arm" of the Church of Global Warming is the United States own Space agency, NASA. The man behind NASA's climate change efforts is James Hansen, who runs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He is also Al Gore's personal climate change guru. Hansen lives by one strong rule. "If God deals you bad numbers--fudge them." Remember when NASA announced October 2008 was the warmest in history and then, "OOPS NEVER MIND" someone figured out a mistake was made? It was James...

The fight over climate science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding the release of the same kind of information that landed a leading British center in hot water over charges that it skewed its data. Christopher C. Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data dating as far back as the...

A leading scientist acclaimed as the grandfather of global warming has denounced the Copenhagen summit on climate change next week as a farce. James Hansen, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Insitute for Space Studies, told The Times that he planned to boycott the UN conference because it was seeking a counter-productive agreement to limit emissions through a “cap and trade” system. “They are selling indulgences there. The developed nations want to continue basically business as usual so they are expected to purchase indulgences to give some small amount of money to developing countries. They do that in the form of...

Samples of a colony of Martians have been put on display in the Natural History Museum, in London. A scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of a series of partly filled pits on the surface of a mineral grain from the Nakhla meteorite Photo: NASA/David McKay The microscopic aliens are on a slice of a meteorite in the museum. Nasa scientists, who used a scanning electron microscope to take snaps, say the bumpy surface resembles a fossilised colony of microbacteria – a simple form of life.

Climate scientists are refuting claims that raw data used in critical climate change reports has been destroyed, rendering the reports and policies based on those reports unreliable. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy group, is arguing that U.S. EPA's climate policies rely on raw data that have been destroyed and are therefore unreliable. The nonprofit group -- a staunch critic of U.S. EPA's efforts to regulate greenhouse gases -- petitioned the agency last week to reopen the public comment period on its proposed "endangerment finding" because the data set had been lost (E&ENews PM, Oct. 9). But climate scientists...

While the idea was tabled several years ago, with suggestions it could even have launched by 2007, no progress has so far been made. However, now Nasa has issued a “teaming opportunity”, offering private companies and designers the chance to help create the craft. The team behind the concept hope that it will be accepted as one of the space agency’s “Discovery” missions, aimed at swiftly and (relatively) inexpensively exploring other worlds in our solar system. Other recent proposals that been put forward for Discovery include a nuclear-powered robot sailing-boat to plough the seas of Saturn’s moon Titan.

1. Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-129) high above Earth's rugged terrain, 25 November 2009 (4288 x 2846 pixels) 2. International Space Station over cloudy Earth, 25 November 2009 (4288 x 2846 pixels) 3. NASA's Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-129) high above the Mediterranean Sea, near the coast of Algeria, 25 November 2009 (4288 x 2846 pixels) Photos and Captions Taken From http://ChamorroBible.org/gpw/gpw-200911.htm (#8, #9, #12) 

This autumn, China and the U.S. began moving toward greater cooperation in space. As China lifted a little more of the veil covering its space program, U.S. officials expressed a greater desire to work together in exploring space. Presidential science adviser John Holdren floated the idea of increased cooperation in human spaceflight last spring. The Augustine committee raised the idea again, and Presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao pledged to deepen space cooperation last week . Unfortunately, there are ample reasons for the U.S. to keep its distance. While the U.S. explicitly decided to separate its space exploration activities from...

Just awesome stuff! http://exposureroom.com/members/minterbartolo.aspx/assets/f18be10bed174e46bc71d3c04c9008d7/

Good Mission.... I'm going to miss the Space Shuttles..

Climate change researchers stand accused of engaging in conspiracy, collusion, possibly-illegal destruction of embarrassing information, manipulation of data and much more, according to news reports. All in an effort to foist their radical socialist agenda on the American people. All the result of e-mail messages between them being made public. Unfortunately, it appears, the folks at NASA didn’t get the memo.

Junk Science: Hacked e-mails from Britain's Climate Research Unit are only the latest evidence of climate fraud. Just ask NASA's James Hansen about the faking of climate data or EPA employees about the suppression of climate fact. For years, noted scientists and other global warming skeptics have been accused of being on the take, their research tainted and funded by grants from Big Oil and other fossil-fuel interests. Now, it turns out, it's the warm-mongers who are fudging the numbers and concealing the inconvenient truth. We don't know who "Deep Throat" is. But according to an interview in Investigate Magazine's...

Climate Change: As scientists confirm the earth has not warmed at all in the past decade, others wonder how this could be and what it means for Copenhagen. Maybe Al Gore can Photoshop something before December. It will be a very cold winter of discontent for the warm-mongers. The climate show-and-tell in Copenhagen next month will be nothing more than a meaningless carbon-emitting jaunt, unable to decide just whom to blame or how to divvy up the profitable spoils of climate change hysteria. The collapse of the talks coupled with the decision by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to put...

Apparently a "Global Climate Center" was hacked and the contents have been posted to the Internet. A ZIP file exceeding 60MB and containing a huge number of emails and other documents has been posted worldwide. Original speculation as to whether the files posted were legitimate or some sort of spoof appears to now be confirmed as legitimate: “It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.” I have not had time to read all of the material...

New Scientist magazine is generally regarded by the secular community as one of the top-ranked science magazines in the world. However, a published opinion by a regular columnist demonstrated how “unscientific” and anti-God some of their articles have become—something we have documented before (see Refutation of New Scientist’s Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions). Amanda Gefter wrote an article discussing multiverse theory, or the idea that our universe may be only one of many that currently exist. Such speculations attempt to explain away the appearance of design in the universe, because of, as we shall see, the spiritual implications. In an...

A new image of the bulge at the center of a distant spiral galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is giving astronomers insight into how these galactic paunches form. The image of NGC 4710 is part of a survey that astronomers have conducted to learn more about the formation of bulges, which are a substantial component of most spiral galaxies. When targeting spiral galaxy bulges, astronomers often seek edge-on galaxies, as their bulges are more easily distinguishable from the disc. The detailed edge-on view of NGC 4710, taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, shows the galaxy's bulge in...

NASA scientists are sick of being asked if the world is going to end in 2012 – so much in fact, they've published an article on their website explaining just why it's a load of rubbish. The release of Roland Emmerich's blockbuster film 2012, in which John Cusack's character Jackson Curtis has to deal with the end of the world, has only made matters worse. There are several theories as to how the world is supposed to end, most of which focus on a particular date - December 21. The best-known is that relating to the Mayan 'long-count' calendar, which...

- Names Ares "Invention of the Year" Based on Launch of Dummy Vehicle Citing Time magazine's selection of NASA's proposed Ares rockets "The Best Invention of the Year" based on a single purported "test flight" of the vehicle on October 28th, the Space Frontier Foundation congratulated NASA on its propaganda triumph. The Foundation pointed out that the rocket launched by NASA was not an Ares 1 at all, but a dummy vehicle cobbled together from pieces of other space systems, an elaborate mock-up shaped and painted to look like the actual vehicle, which isn't even scheduled to fly for another...

On Friday November 13th the movie titled: 2012 which dramatizes global disaster was the number one weekend box office hit in what is the first of quite possibly a deluge of movies that will inundate America and rest of the globe about what far too many believe will be the end of the world. Sure it should be taken as just a light diversion to entertain the great masses, but for far too many it will be taken more seriously. For buried within the value of its entertainment is a nugget of less skepticism at it being just a movie...

The latest object to shoot high-def video from the edge of space is…an arm chair. To promote its REGZA SV LCD TVs (LED backlight, local dimming), Toshiba trekked into the Black Rock Desert with a helium balloon. Watch the result: Click here to go to page with video. This is the first part of the ad. The second half for their Satellite T Series ULV laptops will come out next year. [Toshiba UK via Engadget] Facts about the shoot: • The shots were taken at a staggering 98,268 feet above the earth using Toshiba's own cameras • To reach the...

NASA claims definitive detection of Moon water in the Solar System's 'attic'.On the way to a wet landing.N. GRUMMAN, W. FURLONG/NASA The debate is finally over. Lunar scientists have detected water for certain near the north pole of the Moon, after the impact of a NASA projectile kicked up water vapour along with a plume of dust. But it's not just about the water, say the scientists, who found hints in the plume of other, more exotic molecules, ranging from organic hydrocarbons to mercury. Increasingly, the scientists are viewing the polar craters as the 'attics' of the Solar System, repositories...

LOS ANGELES – For NASA's stuck Mars rover, the Spirit may be willing, but the wheels could prove too weak. The space agency on Thursday outlined a rescue plan to try to free the rover Spirit, which has been bogged in a sand trap on the red planet for half a year. The risky operation is expected to last several months. "If it cannot make the great escape from this sand trap, it's likely that this lonely spot straddling the edge of this crater might be where Spirit ends its adventures on Mars," said Doug McCuistion, who heads the Mars...

Moon moister than thoughtDiscovery of water inside crater paints "a surprising new picture" By JOHN JOHNSON JR., Los Angeles Times First published in print: Saturday, November 14, 2009 Declaring "This is not your father's moon," National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists said Friday that last month's mission to punch a hole in the lunar surface found significant amounts of water in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon's south pole. "The moon is alive," declared Anthony Colaprete, the chief scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission during a briefing at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif....

The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water. Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike. NASA today opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus cater near the moon’s south pole. The impact created by the LCROSS Centaur upper stage rocket created a...

NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, a key component of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions produces this essential ingredient of life. Pyrimidine is a ring-shaped molecule made up of carbon and nitrogen and is the basic structure for uracil, part of a genetic code found in ribonucleic acid (RNA). RNA is central to protein synthesis, but has many other roles. "We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, a component of RNA, non-biologically in a laboratory...

WASHINGTON — A "significant amount" of frozen water has been found on the moon, the US space agency NASA said Friday, boosting hopes of eventually setting up a permanent lunar base. Preliminary data from a moon probe "indicates the mission successfully uncovered water in a permanently shadowed lunar crater," NASA said. "The discovery opens a new chapter in our understanding of the moon," it added in a statement.

Evolutionary philosophy is a bottom-up storytelling project: particles, planets, people. Naturalists (those who say nature is all there is) believe they can invent explanations that are free of miracles, but in practice, miracles pop up everywhere in their stories. This was satirized by Sidney Harris years ago in a cartoon that showed a grad student filling a blackboard with equations. His adviser called attention to one step that needed some elaboration: It said, "Then a miracle happens." Examples of miracles in evolutionary philosophy include the sudden appearance of the universe without cause or explanation, the origin of life, the origin...

NASA and Spaceward Foundation Award Prize Money for Successful Wireless Power Demonstration WASHINGTON -- NASA has awarded $900,000 in prize money to a Seattle company that successfully demonstrated new wireless energy beaming technology which could one day be used to help power a "space elevator." LaserMotive of Seattle was awarded the money after its performance in the Power Beaming Challenge competition, which was a demonstration of wireless power transmission that enabled a robotic device to climb a vertical cable. The competition was held Nov. 4-6 at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif. The Spaceward Foundation of Mountain View,...

The former astronaut arrested in an attack against her romantic rival has pleaded guilty to lesser counts this afternoon. Before a packed courtroom 1:30 p.m., Lisa Marie Nowak, 46, pleaded guilty to counts of third-degree burglary of a conveyance and misdemeanor battery. She was originally charged with more-serious counts of attempted kidnapping and burglary with assault in addition to misdemeanor battery. Prosecutors dropped a count of burglary with assault. Orange County Circuit Court Judge Marc L. Lubet sentenced Nowak to two days in Orange County Jail with credit for time served and one year of probation. She must stay away...

<p>COCOA BEACH, Fla. — Legendary space industry engineer Thomas J. O'Malley, 94, died Friday evening, shortly after a phone call from Mercury astronaut and former U.S. Sen. John Glenn, whom O'Malley launched into space in 1962 by pushing a button.</p>

As a child, I marveled at America's first flea-hops into space. I was 10 when Alan Shepard orbited the Earth in 1961, and I had just graduated high school when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in the summer of 1969. I grew up juggling those technological triumphs with political assassinations, watching the first “reality television” through a black-and-white porthole in our living room. President Kennedy pushed us into space before his rendezvous with Lee Harvey Oswald in '63, and both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King died in the spring of '68, when the moon loomed largest in our...

The U.S. space agency says blogs and tweets will be part of the upcoming launch of space shuttle Atlantis and its mission to the International Space Station. The shuttle is to lift off Monday, Nov. 16, at 2:28 p.m. EST from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA said the STS-129 mission will be commanded by Charles Hobaugh and piloted by Barry Wilmore. Mission astronauts are Robert Satcher Jr., Mike Foreman, Randy Bresnik and Leland Melvin. Wilmore, Satcher and Bresnik will be making their first trips into space. Atlantis and its crew will deliver equipment to the International Space Station....