There’s some kooky stuff going on inside the rings of Saturn. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has identified distinctive giant propellers that could be created by a new class of moon.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft spotted the distinctive structures inside some of Saturn’s rings, marking the first time scientists have managed to track the orbits of individual objects from within a debris disk like the one that makes up Saturn’s complicated ring system.

“Observing the motions of these disk-embedded objects provides a rare opportunity to gauge how the planets grew from, and interacted with, the disk of material surrounding the early sun,” said the study’s co-author Carolyn Porco, one of the lead researchers on the Cassini imaging team based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. “It allows us a glimpse into how the solar system ended up looking the way it does.”

Chew on that.

[Space]

In 1996 a team of NASA scientists published a study saying the they’d found signs of life on a Martian meteorite that crashed to Earth in 1984. They were summarily dismissed by many.

14 years later, as science has caught up, their findings don’t seem so far fetched.

Could we have proof of life on the Red Planet right here?

[Pop Sci]

It’s either that or we’ve begun principal photography on the long-awaited Ghost Busters spin off Slimer Goes To Space.

[Daily Mail via NASA]

So you find a totally sweet cone-shaped rock but can’t shake the idea that it’s somehow special. Where to do you go to get clarity on what the geological oddity really is?

If you are Oregon couple Donald and Debbie Wesson you haul it down to a county fair, which leads you down a path of academic trail to realizing you’ve got your hands on a meteorite.

Wesson finally began asking around after watching a television program about meteorites. He took the rock to a local county fair in Castle Rock, Washington in the summer of 2009, where he spoke with a member of the Southern Washington Mineralogical Society.

The find was referred to Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., where initial sample tests showed it was probably a meteorite. Final confirmation came from the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory at Portland State University, which classified the Morrow County meteorite as an L6 ordinary chondrite that had been highly shocked (S5) but minimally weathered (W1).

The latest find represents a relatively common type of meteorite, according to Melinda Hutson, a planetary scientist at Portland State University who helped make the classification. But, she added that it has several intriguing features.

Also, they got an Elephant Ear and rode the Flying Dutchman.

[Space]

In case anyone was worried.

Scientists from the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Southwest Research Institute, and Boston University suggest that the ribbon of enhanced emissions of energetic neutral atoms, discovered last year by the NASA Small Explorer satellite IBEX, could be explained by a geometric effect coming up because of the approach of the Sun to the boundary between the Local Cloud of interstellar gas and another cloud of a very hot gas called the Local Bubble. If this hypothesis is correct, IBEX is catching matter from a hot neighboring interstellar cloud, which the Sun might enter in a hundred years.

We are unclear on what might happen when the sun passes into the cloud, but if it means this song is relevant again we are willing to deal with the side effects.

[Science Daily]

Launched in 1977 and containing the ultimate Carl Sagan mixtape, The Voyager probes have represented our message in a bottle to alien races and civilizations unknown.

But for the first time, some believe they are talking back.

NASA installed a 12-inch disk containing music and greetings in 55 languages in case intelligent extraterrestrial life ever found it.

But now the spacecraft is sending back what sounds like an answer: Signals in an unknown data format.

In late April, the signals sent back from Voyager 2 suddenly arrived in an unknown format. Unable to decipher the data stream and completely baffled by the cause for the shift in how Voyager 2 communicates with its Earth-bound team, NASA scientists have for the time being instructed the probe to send only information on its operational health and status while they get to the bottom of the sudden and strange behavior.

Alien experts are already theorhizing that alien tech has reprogrammed the Voyager and is attempting contact. Then again, what else would alien experts say.

Or as Steve Martin once found out, maybe they just want more Chuck Berry.

[Daily Telegraph]

We are proud to introduce our new YouTube series, WeirdThingsTV. If you dig this, please feel free to subscribe on YouTube so you don’t miss an episode.

Next clips will come out Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

There has long been a school of thought that bacteria from Earth could contaminate possible life on Mars should be take a man made trip to the Red Planet. However, a new study out of the University of Central Florida says no matter how many smallpox blankets we bring, it is unlikely to make a difference.

Ultimately it is unlikely such microorganisms will be able to replicate once on the Martian surface, the research suggests.

“Without replication, terrestrial microorganisms are very unlikely to contaminate a landing site,” Andrew Schuerger, one of the study’s researchers, told SPACE.com. “Thus, it is unlikely that spacecraft microbes will compromise the search for organics or the search for life on Mars.”

Mars has been one of the primary places that scientists have expanded their quest for extraterrestrial life, and while Curiosity is not intended to be a life-seeking mission, it is still important for a rover to have minimal bacterial impact on the red planet.

Screw it, the first man on Mars should be stained with BBQ sauce and sporting an unseemly running nose while wiping his hands with red rocks.

[Space.com]

Everything dies. Somethings just die, only to be reborn as a deadly threat to those still living.

Everyone say hello to the Zombiesat, a term used by engineers to describe satellites which have lost communication with the ground are now just stumbling around as a shell of their former selves, posing a collision threat to other functional orbiters. So what are we to do with such a menace? Separate the head and destroy the brain?

Nope, turns out you just have to blow them higher into orbit so they either crash into each or slowly descend back into orbit and eventually burn up in the atmosphere.

Or… you could sign on to this awesome plan

Some more exotic measures involving tethers and other props have been proposed, Johnson said, but aren’t yet feasible.

For getting rid of very small pieces of space junk, there are two favorite ideas, he said. One involves shooting lasers at the objects to push them into lower-altitude orbits so they fall back down to Earth more quickly.

“That has technical, economic, as well as policy issues,” Johnson said.

Policy issues include a possible violation on the Total Badass Restriction Act of 1986.

[Space]

Not going to lie to you folks, space is big. Like really big.

To get from one point to another you’re going to need more than just a full tank of gas and a Snapple pinched between your thighs because someone decided to use the cup holders for loose change and a half-drank, week-old Coke bottle.

Luckily, the recent discovery that some asteriods contain water compounds could mean the components of the water ice could be broken down and reassembled into rocket fuel.

“Water is the main component in how you might make propellants,” said Jerry Sanders, leader of in-situ resource utilization at NASA’s Lunar Surface Systems Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “If you’re going to go repeatedly to an asteroid, then the ability to basically start setting up gas stations could be extremely beneficial.”

Researchers announced last week that they had found definitive proof of frozen water, along with organic compounds, coating the surface of the large asteroid 24 Themis in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Previously, scientists had believed that asteroids there were too close to the sun to harbor water without it evaporating away.

Could be a big boon for longer voyages. No word yet on how hydrogen and oxygen could be reassembled to create Slim Jims.

[Space]

The Japanese are going to launch a new solar-powered space ship which will harnass the power of the sun for its energy with huge sails that are thinner than human hair. They are dubbing the project Ikaros. I am assuming this means the engineers only read the first part of the Greek myth before putting it down and assuming everything went well.

Ikaros stands for “Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun.” The name is also a reference to the Greek myth of Icarus, a young man who, with his father Daedalus, attempted to escape exile in Crete by fashioning wings of feathers and wax. According to the myth, Icarus flew too close to the sun, and the heat melted the wax in his wings, causing him to plummet to his death.

Ikaros is scheduled to take to the skies May 18th.

[Mashable]

A space plane designed to demonstrate the sustainability of a reusable, military-operated vehicle designed to orbit the earth will launch soon from Cape Canaveral, Florida. What happens after that is not of your GD business.

But whether the X-37 space plane is merely showing off nearly two decades of research and development or is actually a precursor to militarizing the final frontier, is far from clear since the vehicle’s payload is classified. An Air Force official won’t even say when it will return to California or where it will land. But it can “loiter” over the globe for more than nine months.

“In all honesty, we don’t know when it’s coming back,” said Gary Payton, deputy undersecretary for the Air Force’s space programs, in a conference call with reporters Tuesday.

Is there anyone conspiracy-prone enough to craft an idea of what this launch means?.

[Yahoo]

Hey space fans, don’t be blue that Mean Ol’ Obama said we aren’t sending men to the moon anytime soon. Because once we get there… our pad is going to be totally sick thanks to a new 3-D printing technology that could turn boring lunar dust and moon rocks into a bomb ass base of operations.

Future astronauts might end up living in a moon base created largely from lunar dust and regolith, if a giant 3-D printing device can work on the lunar surface.

The print-on-demand technology, known as D-Shape, could save on launch and transportation costs for manned missions to the moon. But the concept must first prove itself in exploratory tests funded by the European Space Agency (ESA)

“We will make very basic printing trials in a vacuum environment to verify if this is possible,” said Enrico Dini, chairman of Monolite UK Ltd and creator of D-Shape.

Dini’s D-Shape has created full-size sandstone buildings on Earth by using a 3-D printing process similar to how inkjet printers work. It adds a special inorganic binder to sand so that it can build a structure from the bottom up, one layer at a time.

Totally sweet.

[Yahoo!]

After the discovery of Neptune in 1846 astronomers began to wonder if there were other planets beyond its orbit. The discovery of Pluto (now not a planet) seemed to answer the question, but others wondered if even further out a larger earth-sized object could be waiting to be discovered.

Space.com has a fascinating claim made by a planetary scientist, Alan Stern at the Southwest Research Institute:

“When the solar system’s story is finally written, it’s much more likely that it will have closer to 900 planets rather than the nine that we grew up with.”

900 planets? How could that be possible? Anything Earth or Mars-sized in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune would be visible; but beyond the Kuiper Belt is the Oort Cloud:

Brown and Stern say that the Oort Cloud represents a more likely prospect for worlds the size of Mars or Earth. The Oort Cloud surrounds our solar system with billions of icy bodies at distances as far out as 50,000 times the distance between the sun and Earth.

Now these planets are likely to be colder than Hoth, but who knows what we could do with some extreme terraforming…

link: Earth-Sized World Could Lurk in Outer Solar System – Yahoo! News

According to Spaceflight Now, NASA researchers are about to release new evidence that a Martian meteorite shows evidence for life. The research team originally announced the discovery of the meteorite back in 1996. There was a lot of controversy over what exactly they found. Critics pointed out that the kind of bacterial fossil they claimed to have found was far smaller than any terrestrial example and may have been a product of geology. But the science hasn’t stopped:

Now, 13 years after the Martian meteorite life story emerged, the science team finally feels vindicated. Their data shows the meteorite is no smoking gun but is full of evidence that supports the existence of life on the surface of Mars, or in subsurface water pools, early in the planet’s history.

link: Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | Martian meteorite surrenders new secrets of possible life

Here’s Wikipedia’s article on the meteorite:

On August 6, 1996[4] ALH 84001 became newsworthy when it was announced that the meteorite may contain evidence for traces of life from Mars, as published in an article in Science by David McKay of NASA.

The electron microscope revealed chain structures in meteorite fragment ALH84001 Under the scanning electron microscope structures were revealed that may be the remains—in the form of fossils—of bacteria-like lifeforms. The structures found on ALH 84001 are 20-100 nanometres in diameter, similar in size to the theoretical nanobacteria, but smaller than any known cellular life at the time of their discovery. If the structures are really fossilized lifeforms, they would be the first solid evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life, aside from the chance of their origin being terrestrial contamination.

link: Allan Hills 84001 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

According to NewScientist, Researchers examining the data from 1000 galaxy clusters streaming in one direction are puzzled by what is causing this. One interpretation of the data suggests that we’re looking at the effect of a neighboring universe on our own.

There could be an exotic explanation. Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, thinks the flow is a sign of a neighbouring universe. If the tiny patch of vacuum that inflated to become our universe was quantum entangled with other pieces of vacuum – other universes – they could have exerted a force from beyond the present-day visible horizon.

Would this Universe have the same physical laws as our own? Is it some weird mirror universe where a mirror version of you is reading a blog called Normal Things right now? We must investigate…

link: Mystery ‘dark flow’ extends towards edge of universe – space – 16 November 2009 – New Scientist