Last week, Charles Bolden, top administrator of NASA announced that the space agency plans to send a robotic spaceship to lasso a small asteroid and bring it closer to the moon for astronauts to explore. According to him the asteroid lasso mission would halt any apocalypse scenario in future.
On February 11, 2010, NASA launched Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a mission of NASA which will observe the Sun for over five years. More than three years have past since it arrived in the space and within a bit over three years, SDO has taken unlimited pictures of the Sun, showing off its steady increase in activity. Yesterday on April 22, NASA released a video combining three years of images provided by its SDO.
Till now, NASA’s Kepler has detected 2,740 planetary candidates across 2,046 stars and of those candidates, it has already found two similar Earth-sized planet. Recently we’ve come to know that Kepler has discovered three more habitable planets in distant solar systems. This means those planets may contain water, making them potential candidates for life.
NASA has been always very keen to discover new planets in space. Last Friday, NASA announced that it plans to launch a mission to hunt for new planets in 2017.
Professionals who deal with IT infrastructure might have remembered NASA’s Nebula project. The Nebula cloud platform later merged with Rackspace’s Cloud Files platform to create OpenStack. However, some of the people behind the Nebula project have decided to commercialize their expertise and build a company named Nebula in 2011. The company has finally announced the general availability of its first product, Nebula One.
We might be going to see NASA doing something totally new by 2014; instead of just visiting or landing on things in space, it might be going to space to grab one of those things – something that is rather huge – and bring it back to Earth. Details will be formally announced on April 10 when the new budget is rolled out.
In April, red planet Mars and our beloved living ground the Earth will be exactly at the opposite sides of the Sun. NASA has confirmed that due to such alignment of the planets next month, neither mission controllers from the Earth nor the agency’s various Mars spacecraft from space will be able to communicate with each other for few days.
NASA launched its tiny interplanetary probe Voyager 1 towards space on September 5, 1977 to observe the outer planets and the mysterious interstellar medium that lies beyond the solar system. Recently, an astronomer has mentioned that NASA’s venerable Voyager I spacecraft may have become the first man-made object to leave the solar system. But NASA says, it hasn’t left the solar system — yet.