PLUTO BY NIGHT – The night side of Pluto, backlit by the Sun, observed by NASA’s New Horizons space probe on July 15, 2015, when it was around 1.25 million miles from the dwarf planet. (NASA)
A stunning enhanced-color view of Pluto highlights the distinct composition and texture of the dwarf planet’s surface.
A long-awaited human mission to the Red Planet is still a number of years away, with NASA planning their first manned voyage in the 2030s. But at more than 55 million kilometers away, astronauts face at least half a year of space travel just to get to Mars – not to mention the return journey. Of the multitude of obstacles to overcome, the health of the astronauts during such a long period in space is of chief concern.
Scientists in Germany are using advanced imaging technology in a bid to understand one unusual phenomenon - why astronauts’ skin gets thinner while in space. Led by Professor Karsten Koenig from the Department of Biophotonics and Laser Technology at Saarland University, researchers have used high-resolution skin imaging tomography to look into the skin cells of several astronauts before and after a trip into space.
A NASA camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite has returned its first view of the entire sunlit side of Earth from one million miles away.
The color images of Earth from NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) are generated by combining three separate images to create a photographic-quality image. The camera takes a series of 10 images using different narrowband filters – from ultraviolet to near infrared – to produce a variety of science products. The red, green and blue channel images are used in these Earth images.
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The four largest bodies in the Pluto system, to scale: Pluto, Charon, Nix, and Hydra. The images were taken at a variety of times, from 16 to 10 hours before New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto. They have been resized to a common scale (how they would appear if New Horizons were 500,000 kilometers away). Not pictured are Kerberos and Styx; images of those moons of comparable quality have not yet been returned by New Horizons.
Preliminary analysis suggests the overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank was initiated by a flawed piece of support hardware (a “strut”) inside the second stage. Several hundred struts fly on every Falcon 9 vehicle, with a cumulative flight history of several thousand. The strut that we believe failed was designed and material certified to handle 10,000 lbs of force, but failed at 2,000 lbs, a five-fold difference.
Women scientists made up 25% of the Pluto fly-by New Horizon team. Make sure you share this, because erasing women’s achievements in science and history is a tradition. Happens every day.
What’s a few 10^-7 between friends anyway
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