SpaceX Announced They Are Planning To Send Their Red Dragon Capsule To Mars As Soon As 2018

NASA scientists are closer than ever to finding life outside of Earth.

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Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is such a crazy, turbulent storm (the largest known storm in the universe) that it creates sound waves that travel hundreds of miles up and actually heat the planet’s upper atmosphere.

I repeat: sound waves are heating Jupiter’s atmosphere. The area above the Spot is a thousand degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the surrounding atmosphere.

Here’s the journal paper. Here’s our story.

Image credit: Space Telescope Science Institute/NASA

Titan Touchdown

On Jan. 14, 2005, ESA’s Huygens probe made its descent to the surface of Saturn’s hazy moon, Titan. Carried to Saturn by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, Huygens made the most distant landing ever on another world, and the only landing on a body in the outer solar system. This video uses actual images taken by the probe during its two-and-a-half hour fall under its parachutes.

Last space shuttle External Tank arrives at California Science Center.

ET-94 paraded its way through the Los Angeles suburbs today, May 21, as it journeyed to its final home at the California Science Center.

The last surviving flight-worthy space shuttle external tank, ET-94 left the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans April 12, where it has been since it was fabricated in the early 2000′s. It traversed the Panama Canal April 25-27, and arrived at Marina Del Rey in Los Angeles last Wednesday, May 19, after a 36-day sea voyage.

Leaving Marina Del Rey at 12:01am PDT with a New Orleans jazz band, the tank encountered more obstacles than expected during its 15.5 mile trek through the city, arriving at the CSC at 7:13pm PDT.

Towed through the streets of Inglewood, the last time space hardware shut down traffic was in October 2012, when space shuttle Endeavour was towed from Los Angeles International Airport to the CSC.

P/c: LA Times, California Science Center.

Solar

Infrared Jupiter looks hot as Juno spacecraft approaches

NASA’s mission to explore the Jovian system has almost reached its destination, and telescopes on Earth are capturing some especially fiery images of the planet to help.

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 Drake Equation (sometimes known as: Green Bank equation or the Green Bank Formula)

The Drake Equation is a formula that may calculate the possibility of contactable extra-terrestrial alien species. 

Proposed by Frank Drake in 1961, the Drake Equation is a probability argument that would estimate how many contactable, active and communicable alien species there are in our Milky Way. 

The Drake Equation is, as follows;

N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc •  L.

In this equation, N =  the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible. 

R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy.

fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets

ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets

fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point

fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)

fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space

L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space

The Drake Equation acts as a summary of which we can expect to communicate (if at all) with those who are extra-terrestrial.  The last four parameters: fl, fi, fc and L, are not known and are very hard to estimate, with values ranging over many orders of magnitude. 

Therefore it is not a direct measurement of when we will communicate but a roadmap towards creating and estimating the means necessary to communicate with our space buddies.