VIRGO: má dobrý šaty :)

Frank Drake s dcerou (vlevo Nadja dnes)

Experts don’t agree on age of Saturn’s rings | Science News
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/experts-dont-agree-age-saturn-rings

Saturn’s rings have maintained a youthful look, while still possibly being almost as old as the solar system itself. The dazzling belts
of ice continue to keep their age a secret, but researchers hope to get answers from a spacecraft orbiting the ringed planet.

Data from the Cassini spacecraft, in orbit since 2004, may help resolve a decades-long debate over the age of Saturn’s rings, wide belts of shiny ice
chunks orbiting the planet. They may be primordial, dating back to roughly 4.6 billion years ago, or a recent addition in the last 100 million years
or so. Evidence for both scenarios was presented October 16 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences.

There’s not enough pollution in the rings for them to have been around for a long time, argues planetary scientist Paul Estrada of the SETI Institute
in Mountain View, Calif. Cassini data show that about 25 times as much debris — mostly from the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune — rains down on the rings
than previously thought. All that interplanetary rain should not just darken the rings, but each impact should redistribute material as well. Sharp
contrasts in composition seen at the inner edge of the main ring can’t have been sustained for more than a few hundred million years, Estrada says.

The trouble with making rings so recently is how to do it. “It’s hard to make rings in the last 100 million years,” says Larry Esposito, a planetary
scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “This is not an exciting time.” Saturn’s rings were probably created after a moon or some passing icy
body got torn apart in a collision or by wandering too close to the planet. But there hasn’t been much stuff flying around Saturn or the solar system
in the last several billion years.

VIRGO: http://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2016/10/23/cygnus-attached-to-stations-unity-module/
Orbital ATK’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft was berthed to the Unity module of the International Space Station at 10:53 a.m. EDT.
The Expedition 49 crew will begin unloading approximately 5,000 pounds of science investigations, food and supplies when
the hatch between the newly arrived spacecraft and the Unity module of the space station is opened. The spacecraft is
scheduled to spend a little more than a month attached to the station.

Hubble Spins a Web Into a Giant Red Spider Nebula
http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2016/hubble-spins-a-web-into-a-giant-red-spider-nebula

Živě:
NASA TV Public-Education
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdmHHpAsMVw

The Rings and Shepherd Moons of Saturn by Kevin Gill
http://blog.apoapsys.com/2014/05/06/the-rings-and-shepherd-moons-of-saturn/

MSL 1497 update L. Davida
Curiosity on Mars: Weekend Plan of a Hard-working Rover!
http://www.leonarddavid.com/curiosity-on-mars-weekend-plan-of-a-hard-working-rover/

Husté týdny pro TMT! Držím palce, až je mám fialové...

ICYMI: here's Douglas' thoughts on the first day of the contested case.
TMT Contested Case Hearing Update 10/20/2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ3HRgiD25o

'Heartbeat Stars' Unlocked in New Study
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/heartbeat-stars-unlocked-in-new-study

Heartbeat stars, discovered in large numbers by NASA's Kepler space telescope, are binary stars (systems of two stars orbiting each other)
that got their name because if you were to map out their brightness over time, the result would look like an electrocardiogram, a graph of
the electrical activity of the heart. Scientists are interested in them because they are binary systems in elongated elliptical orbits.
This makes them natural laboratories for studying the gravitational effects of stars on each other.

In a heartbeat star system, the distance between the two stars varies drastically as they orbit each other. Heartbeat stars can get as close
as a few stellar radii to each other, and as far as 10 times that distance during the course of one orbit.

At the point of their closest encounter, the stars’ mutual gravitational pull causes them to become slightly ellipsoidal in shape, which is
one of the reasons their light is so variable. This is the same type of "tidal force" that causes ocean tides on Earth. By studying heartbeat
stars, astronomers can gain a better understanding of how this phenomenon works for different kinds of stars.

Tidal forces also cause heartbeat stars to vibrate or "ring" -- in other words, the diameters of the stars rapidly fluctuate as they orbit
each other. This effect is most noticeable at the point of closest approach.

Kepler finds scores of planets around cool dwarf stars : Nature News & Comment
http://www.nature.com/news/kepler-finds-scores-of-planets-around-cool-dwarf-stars-1.20853

NASA’s Kepler observatory has spotted 20 planets that orbit cool, small stars — the largest such haul so far. These long-lived stars,
known as K and M dwarfs, are ubiquitous in the Milky Way and could turn out to host numerous habitable planets.

After the Kepler spacecraft experienced a mechanical failure in 2013 that made it impossible for it to keep observing its original targets,
astronomers gave it a new mission, called K2. It now uses pressure from sunlight to help stabilize the craft. The latest observations with
K2 revealed 87 planet candidates, on top of 667 previously announced candidates, almost all with sizes between those of Mars and Neptune.

Although the original Kepler mission examined many Sun-like stars, the majority of stars in our Galaxy are smaller, fainter, cooler stars,
known as red dwarfs. Such stars make up nearly half the targets of the K2 mission. “There are more than 250 of them within 30 light-years —
all over the place — which is why some other astronomers here might call them the vermin of the sky,” says Courtney Dressing, an astrophysicist
at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who presented the research at a joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society's
Division for Planetary Sciences and the European Planetary Science Congress in Pasadena on 19 October.

A Simple Response to an Elemental Message has now reached 2000 AU (299,195,741,382 km), the estimated closest boundary to
the Oort cloud or the Solar System's outer shell. It may take a while to get surpass this region, estimated to be 50,000 AU thick (~0.79ly).
Distance estimates sourced via; Morbidelli, A. (2005) 'Origin and Dynamical Evolution of Comets and their Reservoirs'

Photonics Dawning as the Communications Light For Evolving NASA Missions
https://www.nasa.gov/...016/photonics-dawning-as-the-communications-light-for-evolving-nasa-missions

A largely unrecognized field called photonics may provide solutions to some of NASA’s most pressing challenges in future spaceflight.

Photonics explores the many applications of generating, detecting and manipulating photons, or particles of light that, among other things,
make up laser beams. On this day in 1983, the General Conference of Weights and Measures adopted the accepted value for the speed of light,
an important photonics milestone. Oct. 21, 2016, is Day of Photonics, a biennial event to raise awareness of photonics to the general public.
The study has multiple applications across NASA missions, from space communications to reducing the size of mission payloads to performing
altitude measurements from orbit.