NASA News 26 January 2015

The Dawn spacecraft is relentlessly heading for the dwarf planet Ceres and NASA scientists are very excited about it. One cannot blame them. We might know quite a bit about our solar system, but we don’t know much about dwarf planets. The images were taken from over 238,000 miles away. I just have to ask this question, was it just a coincidence the distance of the probe from Ceres was about 238,000 miles when the pictures were taken because that is about the same distance as the moon to the earth? Anyway the first photos are not yet clear and have suggestions of craters on them, but they are interesting never the less. Here is the address you can copy and paste into your browser to see Ceres, http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/dawn-delivers-new-image-of-ceres/#.VL6ncEfF98E. Sorry About Facts doesn’t use live links. NASA is promising that as the Dawn spacecraft gets closer to Ceres the photos will get clearer. If you check the NASA site at the end of January NASA states there will be better photos posted. This is the second Dwarf Planet Dawn has visited. It previously photographed Vesta the second most massive body in the asteroid belt. The spacecraft is able to travel for so long because it is powered by an Ion engine.

NASA has been working with some schools, seven to be exact, helping them with rocket research. An example of this is a school in York County, Pennsylvania named Spring Grove High School. NASA is helping the students build a nine-foot rocket which will reach one mile in altitude while traveling several hundreds of miles per hour.

Some experts are saying NASA in conjunction with NOAA misled the public when they claimed last December 2014 was the warmest on record since it was only 1/100 of a degree higher and this is in the statistical error range. This means we tied 2006 and 2003. This same so called experts are now claiming we may be in are in the midst of an 18 years pause in warming. It is important to much of manufacturing to destroy the notion the earth is warming because they want to continue to dump carbon into the air. It is cheaper to do this than employ expensive filters and have to abide by new more restrictive rules. This is the reason for the argument over the 1/100 of a degree call. It is time to realize one of the most important things we can do is protect the earth.

A company called Six Feet Up has helped NASA migrate scientific data from a NASA space probe to a new Plone-powered intranet. You can read more about Plone site by copying and pasting this address into your browser, http://quintagroup.com/cms/plone/powered. The advantage of this new intranet. Is the way it handles massive amounts of data while minimizing the need to scroll horizontally. It also makes the data easier to create charts from and to examine thanks to robust tools which have been included.

NASA has a new fascinating site called SoundCloud. The have put together many of the sounds they have come across in their long existence. These sounds also include Apollo astronauts and all sorts of space sounds. You can go to this site by copy and pasting this address into your browser, https://soundcloud.com/nasa. The amount of recorded sounds is quite large and growing.

NASA is saying we have nothing to worry about even though a giant asteroid is headed our way. The asteroid is about 1/3 of a mile in diameter and named 2004 BL86. We are being told it will not come any closer than 745,000 miles from earth. That is about three times further than the distance of the earth to the moon. Experts are saying we might be able to see it with a pair of powerful binoculars. That sounds too close for comfort to me. The manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program Office said, "And while it poses no threat to Earth for the foreseeable future, it's a relatively close approach by a relatively large asteroid, so it provides us a unique opportunity to observe and learn more.” While the asteroid seems to be traveling slowly it is really traveling at 35,000 miles per hour. It should reach us on January 26 and you will be able to watch it on The Virtual Telescope Project 2.0. The show starts at 2:30 p.m. EST. The address for the Virtual Telescope is http://www.virtualtelescope.eu/webtv/, just copy and paste it into your browser.

On July 14, 2015 NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will begin sending back pictures of Pluto as it gets closer. One thing we have lacked are close up pictures of this downgraded planet. It went from planet to Dwarf Planet but not all astronomers agreed with this decision. A NASA scientist said, "It's been 25 years since we last had an 'interplanetary first encounter': the last was Voyager-2's August 1989 fly-by of Neptune and Triton. With New Horizons' July 2015 fly-by, Pluto, Charon [Pluto's largest moon] and the smaller moons will become 'real worlds'. From Earth, they are 'distant points of light'. We get to visit them up close for the first time." This has to be one of the more interesting missions, there might even be small moons there we are not aware of.

NASA cut is live video feed from the space station again and posted a message about technical difficulties. This was not the first time this has happened and not the first time they lied to us about this. Why am I being so harsh with them? The answer to this question is easy. Before the feed was cut you can see a large round object rising from the earth’s atmosphere and heading into space. Another time when the feed was cut a different UFO was flying in front of the camera. These childish cover-ups are getting tiresome. If the objects would have been ours, NASA would have had enough warning to cut the feed BEFORE anything was seen on it, so what does this leave us with? The answer seems to be alien spacecraft.

The new engine which is going to be deployed in NASA’s Space Launch System known as the SLS is the RS-25 and it was fired up and performed flawlessly for 500 seconds. I shouldn’t say this is a brand new engine, just new to the SLS since it was the main engine of the space shuttle. Four of these engines will supply the power to the SLS on future missions, including a mission to Mars.