The Sprawling Caloris Basin On Mercury Is One Of The Solar System’s Largest Impact Basins, Created

Comet McNaught.

Pre-Winter Storm, Southwestern Australia in 2014

Credit: NASA / ISS

China’s giant alien-hunting telescope is ready

Our alien-hunting game just got a lot stronger with the completion of a huge radio telescope in the Guizhou province of China. It’s called the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), and it’s designed to listen for signs of alien life out in the cosmos. The telescope is finished, but the construction was not without human rights controversy.

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The Handle 2 camera, another doomed Kodak instant, 1979.

1959 Radio Man

Aerospace Engineering Magazine  April 1962

FLAIR FLIGHT   A contrast-enhanced image produced from the Hubble images of comet ISON taken April 23, 2013 reveals the subtle structure in the inner coma of the comet; the coma decreases in brightness proportionally to the distance from the nucleus.  Comet ISON, thought to have travelled from the Oort Cloud surrounding our solar system beginning a million years ago, will make its closest approach to the Sun on Thursday.  (Photo: NASA via AP / The Telegraph)

Enceladus - Life in our solar system?

Enceladus is Saturns icy moon that measures approximately 504km in diameter, about a tenth of the size of Saturn’s largest moon Titan. Almost completely covered in ice, this moon could potentially harbour the same type of life-sustaining chemical reactions found in deep sea hydrothermal vents here on Earth.

In 2005, NASA’s Saturn orbiting Cassini spacecraft spotted geysers of water and ice erupting fro fissures near Enceladus’ South Pole. Scientists believe they originate from a great ocean beneath the shell of ice. This ocean manages to stay liquid because the gravitational force exerted by Saturn is so intense that it twists and stretches the moon generating internal heat.

In October 2015, Cassini went on a dive through one of the plumes passing within just 39km of Enceladus’ surface. A team of scientists led by Hunter Waite analysed the observations made by the spacecraft. They discovered that the geysers contain between 0.4%-1.4% molecular hydrogen (H2) and 0.3%-0.8% carbon dioxide (CO2). These are being produced continuously by reactions between hot water and rock near the core of the moon. Some of the most primitive metabolic pathways found in microbes at deep ocean hydrothermal vents involve the reduction of CO2 with H2 to form methane (CH4) by a process known as methanogenesis.