An Atmosphere Around the Moon? Research Indicates Yes | NASA
https://www.nasa.gov/...nd-the-moon-nasa-research-suggests-significant-atmosphere-in-lunar-past.html

Looking up at the Moon at night, Earth’s closest neighbor appears in shades of gray and white; a dry desert in the vacuum of space,
inactive and dead for billions of years. Like many things, though, with the Moon, there is so much more than what meets the eye.

Research completed by NASA Marshall Space Flight Center planetary volcanologist Debra Needham in Huntsville, Alabama, and planetary
scientist David Kring at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, suggests that billions of years ago, the Moon actually
had an atmosphere. The ancient lunar atmosphere was thicker than the atmosphere of Mars today and was likely capable of weathering
rocks and producing windstorms. Perhaps most importantly, it could be a source for some, if not all, of the water detected on the Moon.

Armagh Observatory
http://star.arm.ac.uk/press/2017/MarsTr_Oct17_pr.html

The planet Mars shares its orbit with a handful of small asteroids, the so-called Trojans. Among them, one finds a unique group, all moving in very similar orbits,
suggesting that they originated from the same object. But the mechanism that produced this "family" has been a mystery. Now, an international team of astronomers
believe they have identified the culprit: sunlight. Their findings, which highlight how small asteroids near the Sun may evolve, are to be presented at the annual
Meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society at Provo, Utah this week, by Dr. Apostolos Christou, a Research Astronomer at
the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium in Northern Ireland, United Kingdom and leader of the research team.

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-s-messier-catalog

While the Hubble Space Telescope has not produced images of every object in the Messier catalog, it has observed 93 of them as of August 2017.
Some of Hubble's photographs offer views of a given object in its entirety, but many focus on specific areas of interest. While Hubble is able
to magnify objects very effectively, it has a relatively small field of view. This means that, in some cases, Hubble would need to take many
exposures to capture an entire object. Although this is not always an efficient use of its time, as is the case for the widely spaced “open”
star clusters in the Messier catalog, many exposures are taken when the scientific value justifies the time spent. One of these objects is the
Andromeda galaxy (designated M31 in Messier’s catalog). In order to create a mosaic image that depicts almost half of Andromeda, Hubble has
taken nearly 7,400 exposures of the galaxy.

News | Deep Space Communications via Faraway Photons
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6967

A spacecraft destined to explore a unique asteroid will also test new communication hardware that uses lasers instead of radio waves.

The Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) package aboard NASA's Psyche mission utilizes photons -- the fundamental particle of visible
light -- to transmit more data in a given amount of time. The DSOC goal is to increase spacecraft communications performance and efficiency
by 10 to 100 times over conventional means, all without increasing the mission burden in mass, volume, power and/or spectrum.

Tapping the advantages offered by laser communications is expected to revolutionize future space endeavors - a major objective of NASA's
Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD).

The DSOC project is developing key technologies that are being integrated into a deep space-worthy Flight Laser Transceiver (FLT), high-tech
work that will advance this mode of communications to Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 6. Reaching a TRL 6 level equates to having technology
that is a fully functional prototype or representational model.

Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor Wakes the World to Smashing Stars | NASA
https://www.nasa.gov/...fermi-gamma-ray-burst-monitor-wakes-the-world-to-smashing-neutron-stars.html

An Ordinary Gamma-ray Burst with Extraordinary Consequences
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfWKBo2i8Dk

Cassini: The Grand Finale: NASA Team Finds Noxious Ice Cloud on Saturn’s Moon Titan
https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/3128/nasa-team-finds-noxious-ice-cloud-on-saturns-moon-titan/

Researchers with NASA’s Cassini mission have found evidence of a toxic hybrid ice in a wispy cloud high above the south pole of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
The finding is a new demonstration of the complex chemistry occurring in Titan’s atmosphere—in this case, cloud formation in the giant moon’s stratosphere—and
part of a collection of processes that ultimately helps deliver a smorgasbord of organic molecules to Titan’s surface.

SwRI scientists dig into the origin of organics on Ceres | SwRI
http://www.swri.org/press-release/swri-scientists-dig-origin-organics-ceres

Since NASA’s Dawn spacecraft detected localized organic-rich material on Ceres, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has been digging into the data to explore different scenarios
for its origin. After considering the viability of comet or asteroid delivery, the preponderance of evidence suggests the organics are most likely native to Ceres.

Number of undiscovered near-Earth asteroids revised downward
https://phys.org/news/2017-10-undiscovered-near-earth-asteroids-downward.html

Observers have been cataloging potentially hazardous asteroids for decades. Based on the number of finds, the area of sky explored, and the limiting brightness our telescopes
and cameras can reach, researchers can estimate what fraction of the NEA population has been detected so far and how many more objects lurk undiscovered. Harris has published
numerous such estimates over the years. Recently he realized that his estimates have been plagued by a seemingly innocuous but nonetheless consequential round-off error. Once
corrected, the estimated number of large (diameter > 1 kilometer) NEAs remaining to be discovered decreases from more than 100 to less than 40.

The population ("size-frequency distribution") of NEAs is usually given in terms of number versus brightness, since most discovery surveys operate in visible (reflected) light.
Brightness isn't a reliable proxy for size, though, because asteroid surfaces don't all have the same albedo, or reflectivity. NEA brightnesses are expressed in units of absolute
magnitude H, with lower numbers indicating brighter objects. The IAU Minor Planet Center—the world's clearinghouse for asteroid measurements—rounds off reported values of H to
the nearest 0.1 magnitude. While this is mostly unimportant, amounting to a reduction in the estimated NEA population N ( less than H ) of only about 7%, it becomes significant in
assessing the completion of surveys for the largest objects.

Bright daylight meteor recorded over Long Island, New York
https://watchers.news/2017/10/19/new-york-daylight-meteor-long-island/

Fireball footage viewed from Sea Girt NJ on October 18 2017 Meteor Space Debris entering atmosphere
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka-STlR_1ow

Los Alamos researchers and supercomputers help interpret the latest LIGO findings
http://www.lanl.gov/discover/news-release-archive/2017/October/1017-ligo-findings.php

The theorists tweaked their models and, to their delight, the new LIGO data confirmed that heavy elements beyond iron were formed by
the r-process (rapid process) in the neutron-star merger. The gravitational wave observation was having a major impact on theory.

They also quickly noticed that, within seconds of the time of the gravitational waves, the Fermi spacecraft reported a burst of gamma
rays from the same part of the sky. This is the first time that a gravitational wave source has been detected in any other way. It
confirms Einstein’s prediction that gravitational waves travel at the same speed as gamma rays: the speed of light.

https://www.facebook.com/NASAGoddard/videos/10156696111280898/

Gravity has been making waves - literally. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the first direct detection of gravitational waves
back in 2015. On Monday, October 16, astronomers announced another huge advance in the field of gravitational waves - for the first time,
we’ve observed light and gravitational waves from the same source, showing exactly where gravitational waves originated.

This Facebook Live goes deep inside this new era of astronomy. We’ll discuss how this event was detected by our NASA Fermi Gamma-ray Space
Telescope, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European Gravitational
Observatory’s Virgo and review how many precious metals on Earth, like gold, are remnants of these collisions of neutron stars from millions
of light-years away.

Crews battle brush fire near Mount Wilson Observatory - Story | KTTV
http://www.foxla.com/news/local-news/crews-battle-brush-fire-near-mount-wilson

Firefighters worked Tuesday to extinguish a fire that scorched about 26 acres of brush after it broke out
before dawn near the Mount Wilson Observatory in the Angeles National Forest northeast of Los Angeles.

No injuries were reported and no structures have been threatened, the department reported. Deputies from
the sheriff's Crescenta Valley Station helped evacuate Mount Wilson Observatory employees.

Study shows how water could have flowed on ‘cold and icy’ ancient Mars | News from Brown
http://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/10/icyhighlands

Research by planetary scientists at Brown University finds that periodic melting of ice sheets on a cold
early Mars would have created enough water to carve the ancient valleys and lakebeds seen on the planet today.

Young star provides a glimpse of how planets are made | Cosmos
https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/young-star-provides-a-glimpse-of-how-planets-are-made

High powered telescopes aimed at a distant young hot star called V1247 Orionis have yielded
some intriguing clues to one of astronomy’s most enduring mysteries: how planets form.

The star – which is being monitored by the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA) telescope
in Chile for – can be found in the background of Orion’s Belt. Like most young, hot stars,
it is surrounded by a large disc of gas and dust.

Astronomers believe that these discs are intimately bound up with the process of planet formation,
but the mechanism is poorly understood.

Dust existing at the outer edges of the disc is likely to drift away into space, while that in
the inner regions has been shown to be subjected to drag from the surrounding gas. As a result,
it tends to fall inwards into the star in a process known as “radial drift”.

Now, however, a team led by Stefan Kraus from the University of Exeter in the UK has analysed data
from ALMA and identified a large anomaly in the make-up of the disc.

Is S0-2 a Binary Star?
http://aasnova.org/2017/10/17/is-s0-2-a-binary-star/

The most exciting discoveries in astronomy all have something in common: they let us marvel at the fact that nature obeys laws of physics.
The star S0-2 is one of these exciting discoveries. S0-2 (also known as S2) is a fast-moving star that has been observed to follow a full
elliptical, 16-year orbit around the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, precisely according to Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.
Serving as a test-particle probe of the gravitational potential, S0-2 provides some of the best constraints on the black hole’s mass and
distance yet. S0-2 is the brightest of the S-stars, a group of young main-sequence stars concentrated within the inner 1” (0.13 ly) of
the nuclear star cluster.

The next time S0-2 reaches its closest approach to the black hole, in 2018, there will exist a unique opportunity to detect a deviation from
Keplerian motion — namely the relativistic redshift of S0-2’s radial (line-of-sight) velocity — in a direct measurement. In anticipation of
this event, the authors of today’s paper investigate possible consequences of S0-2 being not a single star, but a spectroscopic binary, which
would complicate this measurement.

Microbes leave "fingerprints" on Martian rocks
http://medienportal.univie.ac.at/...ailansicht/artikel/microbes-leave-fingerprints-on-martian-rocks/

Scientists around Tetyana Milojevic from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Vienna are in search of unique biosignatures,
which are left on synthetic extraterrestrial minerals by microbial activity. The biochemist and astrobiologist investigates these
signatures at her own miniaturized "Mars farm" where she can observe interactions between the archaeon Metallosphaera sedula and Mars-
like rocks. These microbes are capable of oxidizing and integrating metals into their metabolism. The original research was currently
published in the journal "Frontiers in Microbiology".