Engineers at NASA created this video that shows its All-Terrain, Hex-Limbed, Extra-Terrestrial Explorer (ATHLETE) dancing. ATHLETE is a working prototype of a robot that could one day help unload bulky cargo from stationary landers and transport it long distances over terrain on the moon. You can read more about ATHLETE here. The video of the six-legged robot was taken near the the grounds of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was sped up to make it look like the robot is dancing to the beat of the music. Take a look:
NASA to Search for Signs of Life in Our Solar System
CNN's John Roberts talked to Jim Green, Director, Planetary Science Division, about NASA's new efforts at finding and understanding life outside of Earth. The mission comes as Stephen Hawking warns that alien contact could be dangerous. The missions NASA plans to run aren't likely to result in dangerous alien contact. They are looking for tiny signs of life on the moons of planets in our solar system. Jim Green says Europa may be one of the most promising prospects, because it contains so much water. You can find out more about NASA's plans to search our solar system at solarsystem.nasa.gov. Take a look:
Dr. Edgar Mitchell is a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission and he was the sixth man to walk on the Moon. Dr. Mitchell also insists that aliens have visited Earth and that governments are actively covering it up.
"I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real," Dr Mitchell said.
"It's been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it's leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.
"I've been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it's been happening quite a bit."
Dr Mitchell, who has a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering and a Doctor of Science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics claimed Roswell was real and similar alien visits continue to be investigated.
He told the astonished Kerrang! radio host Nick Margerrison: "This is really starting to open up. I think we're headed for real disclosure and some serious organisations are moving in that direction."
NASA issued a quick denial.
In a statement, a spokesman said: "NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe.
"Dr Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinions on this issue."
If Dr. Mitchell is correct about a cover-up than this is exactly the type of denial one would expect NASA to make. You can listen to the interview with Dr. Mitchell where he discusses the UFO phenomena here.
Phoenix Lander Discovers Ice, Salt or Something Else?
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander may be on the verge of a big discovery. The picture above reveals a photograph of a white substance that may be ice, salt or some other material. Here are NASA's notes on the photograph:
This color image was acquired by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander's Surface Stereo Imager on the 19th day of the mission, or Sol 19 (June 13, 2008), after the May 25, 2008, landing. This image shows one trench informally called "Dodo-Goldilocks" after two digs (dug on Sol 18, or June 12, 2008) by Phoenix's Robotic Arm. The trench is 22 centimeters (8.7 inches) wide and 35 centimeters (13.8 inches) long. At its deepest point, the trench is 7 to 8 centimeters (2.7 to 3 inches) deep.
White material, possibly ice, is located only at the upper portion of the trench, indicating that it is not continuous throughout the excavated site. According to scientists, the trench might be exposing a ledge, or only a portion of a slab, of the white material.
Red Orbit reports that a mission scientist believes the mysterious white stuff is ice but says until it disappears (melts) they can't be 100% certain.
"We think it's ice. But again, until we can see it disappear ... we're not guaranteed yet," mission scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis said Monday.
One of the ovens on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander continued baking its first sample of Martian soil over the weekend, while the Robotic Arm dug deeper into the soil to learn more about white material first revealed on June 3.
"The oven is working very well and living up to our expectations," said Phoenix co-investigator Bill Boynton of the University of Arizona, Tucson. Boynton leads the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA), or oven instrument, for Phoenix.
Red Orbit also reports that the rover's oven is working well which is good news because initially there were reports of a struggle to get Mars dirt into the oven.
You can keep up with all of the Phoenix Lander's adventures on Twitter and Plurk. The frequent updates are posted from the point-of-view of the lander.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University
NASA has made a promotional video about what a return to the moon would be like. It's very cool. Bad Astronomy writes, "NASA needs to do lots more stuff like this." We agree.
The Associated Press is reporting that NASA does not have the $1 billion in its budget to track down killer asteroids that might cause us harm.
NASA officials say the space agency is capable of finding nearly all the asteroids that might pose a devastating hit to Earth, but there isn't enough money to pay for the task so it won't get done.
The cost to find at least 90 percent of the 20,000 potentially hazardous asteroids and comets by 2020 would be about $1 billion, according to a report NASA will release later this week. The report was previewed Monday at a Planetary Defense Conference in Washington.
Congress in 2005 asked NASA to come up with a plan to track most killer asteroids and propose how to deflect the potentially catastrophic ones.
The article says NASA already tracks large objects (at least 3,300 feet in diameter) that might get close enough to Earth to cause us problems. It is the smaller ones - which could still be very destructive -- that NASA can't afford to track. If funding can't be found than we will never know how many more asteroids there are out there like the 390-meter wide Apophis that are possibly going to hit us.
The New York Times recently reported that NASA's mission statement has been changed to delete the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."
From 2002 until this year, NASA's mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: "To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can."
In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" deleted. In this year's budget and planning documents, the agency’s mission is "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."
David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush’s goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.
But the change comes as an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the "understand and protect" phrase was not merely window dressing but actively influenced the shaping and execution of research priorities. Without it, these scientists say, there will be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
The Why Files reports that some NASA scientists are skeptical of the move.
Although Hansen will no longer have the mission statement to justify his research on global warming, on July 29, Griffin assured The New York Times that the change does not reduce NASA's commitment to Earth science. "The strategic plan states that one of our strategic goals is to "study Earth from space to advance scientific understanding and meet societal needs."
But skepticism remains. One scientist (who did not want to be named for fear of retribution from NASA) questioned the motivation behind this recent change. "It's really curious to see these changes coming during the Bush Administration — perhaps the most science-unfriendly administration in recent history. From having White House flunkies doctoring scientific reports on global warming, putting political 'minders' in charge of science communication, and slashing budgets for Earth and environmental science, you have to wonder if this is all politically driven."
It does seem like a suspicious move considering the Bush Administration's opposition any science that suggests global warming is a manmade problem.
It is worth noting that just a couple months before the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" was dropped from NASA's statement this editorial ran in the Boston Globe
SOMEONE SHOULD sit NASA's leaders down and have them read the part of the agency's mission statement that says NASA will work to "understand and protect our home planet." Budget cuts, commitments to the International Space Station, and President Bush's plan to send astronauts to the moon by 2020 have forced the cancellation or postponement of projects aimed at better understanding what is happening on Earth.
The BBC has an interesting interview with Gary McKinnon, a hacker accused of hacking into NASA and US military computer networks. In the interview he says he saw a photograph of an alien spacecraft while hacked into NASA. McKinnon also talks about UFOs being airbrushed out of satellite images.
SK: What did you find inside Nasa?
GM: One of these people was a Nasa photographic expert, and she said that in building eight of Johnson Space Centre they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging. What she said was there was there: there were folders called "filtered" and "unfiltered", "processed" and "raw", something like that.
I got one picture out of the folder, and bearing in mind this is a 56k dial-up, so a very slow internet connection, in dial-up days, using the remote control programme I turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering as it came onto the screen.
But what came on to the screen was amazing. It was a culmination of all my efforts. It was a picture of something that definitely wasn't man-made.
It was above the Earth's hemisphere. It kind of looked like a satellite. It was cigar-shaped and had geodesic domes above, below, to the left, the right and both ends of it, and although it was a low-resolution picture it was very close up.
Unfortunately, McKinnon says he was unable to make a copy of any of the information or photographs he found. NASA also told the BBC that they "would ever manipulate images in order to deceive and said it had a policy of open and full disclosure, adding it had no direct evidence of extra-terrestrial life."
The Mars rovers Spirt and Opportunity continue to explore the Martian landscape. The rovers have already driven 11 times farther than what NASA had originally planned for them according to recent NASA update.
Spirit studied signs of a long-ago explosion at a bright, low plateau called "Home Plate" during February and March. Then one of its six wheels quit working, and Spirit struggled to complete a short advance to a north-facing slope for the winter. "For Spirit, the priority has been to reach a safe winter haven," said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover project.
The rovers have operated more than eight times as long as their originally planned three-month explorations on Mars. Each has driven more than 6.8 kilometers (4.2 miles) about 11 times as far as planned. Combined, they have returned more than 150,000 images. Two years ago, the project had already confirmed that at least one place on Mars had a wet and possibly habitable environment long ago. The scientific findings continue.
Opportunity spent most of the past four months at Erebus, a highly eroded impact crater about 300 meters (1,000 feet) in diameter, where the rover found extensive exposures of thin, rippled layering interpreted as a fingerprint of flowing water. "What we see at Erebus is a thicker interval of wetted sediment than we've seen anywhere else," said Dr. John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology, "The same outcrops also have cracks that may have formed from wetting and drying."
In mid-March, Opportunity began a 2-kilometer (1.6-mile) trek from Erebus to Victoria, a crater about 800 meters (half a mile) across, where a thick sequence of sedimentary rocks is exposed. In the past three weeks, Opportunity has already driven more than a fourth of that distance.
NASA says Spirit did reach its safe Winter haven. You can keep up with the rovers and see Mars images on these two NASA websites.
National Geographic reports that NASA scientists have discovered geysers of water on Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. The images were taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
When Cassini imaged Enceladus's south pole early last year, researchers noticed plumes of what appeared to be a steamlike substance spewing from the 300-mile-wide (480-kilometer-wide) moon's crust.
At first Porco's team thought the billows might be water vapor rising from subsurface ice deposits. Then the scientists realized they were seeing something unprecedented: outer-space liquid-water geysers not unlike Yellowstone's Old Faithful.
What causes these geysers to form? According to Porco and her colleagues, unknown heat sources inside Enceladus melt ice into deposits of subsurface water. Under pressure, these water pockets burst through the icy crust in fountainlike jets.
"Once the water comes out it freezes, and that produces copious amounts of ice particles," Porco said.
Science Magazine also has an article about the discovery. More image and pictures can be found here on the Cassini Imaging Diary website.
NASA astronomers recently spotted a rare meteor strike on the Moon. An article on nasa.gov discusses the sighting which was made using a 10-inch-diameter telescope.
Suggs and Cooke next consulted star charts and lunar imaging software and determined the meteoroid was likely a Taurid, part of an annual meteor shower active at the time of the strike. Based on the amount of light produced the object was roughly five inches in diameter, traveling more than 60,000 mph, and may have gouged a crater nearly 10 feet in diameter out of the moon's surface.
The Taurids, which approach Earth from the direction of the Taurus constellation, are believed to be ancient remnants of comet Encke, which orbits the Sun every 3.3 years.
NASA scientists previously studied lunar meteor strikes during the Apollo moon program, but lacked the sophisticated video cameras and high-powered image processors to capture the tiny, telling flashes. Now, however, as NASA readies its next-generation spaceship to carry explorers back to the moon for potential long-term stays, Suggs and Cooke say lunar impact research is more vital than ever.
The image on the right is an artists rendering of the event from NASA.
CNN reports that NASA has developed a $100 billion plan to return to the moon in 2018. The moon missions will show that man can live off resources found on the moon. It will require the building of new spacecraft.
NASA's plan envisions being able to land four-person human crews anywhere on the Moon's surface and to eventually use the system to transport crew members to and from a lunar outpost that it would consider building on the lunar south pole, according to the charts, because of the regions elevated quantities of hydrogen and possibly water ice.
One of NASA's reasons for going back to the Moon is to demonstrate that astronauts can essentially "live off the land" by using lunar resources to produce potable water, fuel and other valuable commodities.
Such capabilities are considered extremely important to human expeditions to Mars which, because of the distances involved, would be much longer missions entailing a minimum of 500 days spent on the planet's surface.
The CNN article also describes some of the spacecraft NASA will need to be build like the Crew Launch Vehicle and Crew Exploration Vehicle.
NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle is expected to cost $5.5 billion to develop, according to government and industry sources, and the Crew Launch Vehicle another $4.5 billion. The heavy-lift launcher, which would be capable of lofting 125 metric tons of payload, is expected to cost more than $5 billion but less than $10 billion to develop, according to these sources.
NASA's plan also calls for using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, equipped with as many as six seats, to transport astronauts to and from the international space station. An unmanned version of the Crew Exploration Vehicle could be used to deliver a limited amount of cargo to the space station.
MSNBC also has a similar article about NASA's plans. Space.com also has more information about future NASA missions here and here.
NASA has announced that it will delay any new Space Shuttle launches until March, 2005. NASA also said it will launch with Discovery instead of Atlantis. MSNBC.com reports that NASA says it is making progress on tracking down the foam problem but still doesn't know what went wrong.
Gerstenmaier said the foam investigation was making "very good progress," but that it was still unclear exactly what had gone wrong.
In addition to the foam repairs, NASA said the delay would allow it to shift the shuttle order around so that Atlantis would not be forced to make two missions in a row, with a quick turnaround. Now that there's a seven-month delay, Discovery will take on STS-121, the next scheduled mission, and Atlantis will take the one after that, STS-115, currently set for May 2006.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin said he did not think the delays would greatly impact the five-year plan to finish building the international space station and then retire the shuttle. "We need to view shuttle missions as a process," he said, instead of focusing on individual missions in isolation.
CNN reports that a faulty fuel sensor has delayed the launch of the Space Shuttle. The launch would have been the first since the Columbia disaster 2 1/2 years ago.
NASA said the sensor device was showing low fuel levels despite the exterior tank having been filled just hours before.
"It will take some time really to understand what to do to remedy the situation," NASA spokesman George Diller said.
"There are long faces here in the control center and around the site. Everybody was so looking forward to flying today," Diller said.
Crew members were already aboard the orbiter when the launch was canceled.
The current launch window closes on July 31st so NASA will have until then to launch Discovery. CNN says the launch has been delayed until at least Saturday.
NASA has selected July 13th as the next launch date for the Discovery space shuttle. It will be the first launch the Columbia disaster in February 2003. The BBC reportsthat the shuttle is safe despite meeting 3 of the recommendations made by the Columbia Accident Investingation Board:
Earlier this week, a panel monitoring Nasa said the agency had failed to meet three of 15 recommendations made by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (Caib) for the safe resumption of shuttle flights.
But Nasa Administrator Michael Griffin said Discovery was fit for launch.
"Based on a very thorough and very successful flight readiness review, we're currently 'go' for launch of Discovery on 13 July," he announced.
A NASA press release also has the following comments about the new Space Shuttle mission from NASA Administrator Michael Griffin:
"After a vigorous, healthy discussion our team has come to a decision: we're ready to go," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said after the meeting. "The past two and half years have resulted in significant improvements that have greatly reduced the risk of flying the Shuttle. But we should never lose sight of the fact that space flight is risky.
"The Discovery mission, designated STS-114, is a test flight," Griffin said, noting that astronauts will try out a host of new Space Shuttle safety enhancements. In addition, Discovery will carry 15 tons of supplies and replacement hardware to the International Space Station. July 13 is the beginning of three weeks of possible launch days that run through July 31.
More about NASA's return to flight can be found here.
The New York Times recently 
The Mars rovers Spirt and Opportunity continue to explore the Martian landscape. The rovers have already driven 11 times farther than what NASA had originally planned for them according to recent NASA 
National Geographic 
NASA astronomers recently spotted a rare meteor strike on the Moon. An 
