You Can Visit Real Alien Planets in VR Thanks to This Awesome New Simulation
https://www.space.com/38749-visit-six-real-exoplanets-with-virtual-reality.html

Ever wonder what it would be like to stand on an alien planet while you're lacerated by burning rain?
Most exoplanets might not be great to visit in real life, but a new 360-degree video brings the experience
to the safety of virtual reality, offering viewers a tour of six exoplanets across the universe.

The tour comes from animation-and-virtual-effects house Engine House VFX, which teamed up with the Bristol
Science Centre and exoplanet scientists at the University of Exeter, in England.

Take a Virtual Reality tour of six REAL exoplanets (4K, 360° VR experience) | We The Curious
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhLExhpXX0E

The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog - Planetary Habitability Laboratory @ UPR Arecibo
http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog

Here is the Periodic Table of Exoplanets with over 3700 confirmed worlds:

VIRGO:

http://seti.berkeley.edu:8000/observations-of-ross-128/

Exciting news: the HARPS exoplanet hunter team have discovered a new, Earth-like exoplanet orbiting around the star Ross 128, one of our closest neighbors.
This newly discovered 'exo-Earth', designated Ross 128b, is particularly remarkable as it is thought to have surface temperatures similar to here on Earth.

Curiously, this is the second time this year Ross 128 has been in the news. In May 2017, an intriguing signal in the direction of Ross 128 was detected at
Arecibo. In July, we conducted follow-up observations with Green Bank Telescope and concluded that disappointingly, the signal was most likely due to radio
interference from a passing satellite. Our analysis has now been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology; data from our
observations is available for download at http://seti.berkeley.edu/ross128/.

Ross 128 was also observed over the 1.1-1.9 GHz band as part of Breakthrough Listen's nearby star survey. Again, we did not detect any signals of SETI interest.
These data are available online, and our analysis is detailed in the Astrophysical Journal (E. Enriquez et. al., 2017).

So sadly, we've already looked closely at Ross 128 and have come up empty. Nonetheless, as Ross 128b is such an exciting target, we are considering additional,
deeper observations at radio and optical wavelengths. Nearby exoplanets are particularly exciting from a SETI perspective as they permit us to search for and
potentially detect much weaker signals than from more distant targets.

!!!
Project Lyra: Sending a Spacecraft to 1I/’Oumuamua (formerly A/2017 U1), the Interstellar Asteroid
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=38728

Now that we have determined that the object now known as 1I/’Oumuamua is indeed interstellar in origin,
is there any way we could launch a mission to study it? The study below, written by key players in the
Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is), examines the possibilities. Andreas Hein is Executive as well
as Technical Director of i4is, while Nikolas Perakis, a graduate student at the Technical University of
Munich, serves as Deputy Technical director. Kelvin Long is president and co-founder of i4is; Adam Crowl,
a familiar figure to Centauri Dreams readers, is active in its technical programs. Physicist and radio
astronomer Marshall Eubanks is the founder of Asteroid Initiatives; systems engineer Robert Kennedy is
president of i4is-US and general chair of the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop. Propulsion scientist Richard
Osborne serves as i4is Director of Technology & Strategic Foresight. Their plan for 1I/’Oumuamua follows.

[1711.03155] Project Lyra: Sending a Spacecraft to 1I/'Oumuamua (former A/2017 U1), the Interstellar Asteroid
https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03155

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia21970/jupiter-s-stunning-southern-hemisphere

See Jupiter’s southern hemisphere in beautiful detail in this new image taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. The color-enhanced view captures
one of the white ovals in the “String of Pearls,” one of eight massive rotating storms at 40 degrees south latitude on the gas giant planet.

The image was taken on Oct. 24, 2017 at 11:11 a.m. PDT (2:11 p.m. EDT), as Juno performed its ninth close flyby of Jupiter. At the time
the image was taken, the spacecraft was 20,577 miles (33,115 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a latitude of minus
52.96 degrees. The spatial scale in this image is 13.86 miles/pixel (22.3 kilometers/pixel).

Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager.

‘Unlucky’ dinosaurs: no extinction if asteroid had hit almost any other part of Earth | Science | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/...aurs-no-extinction-if-asteroid-had-hit-almost-any-other-part-of-earth

Only 13% of the Earth’s surface harboured rich enough hydrocarbon deposits to cause a mass extinction following an impact, research reveals

The massive asteroid that slammed into Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs might never have triggered a mass extinction had it struck almost
any other part of the planet, scientists claim.

In work that reveals just how unlucky the prehistoric beasts were, researchers calculate that the odds of the enormous space rock wreaking
such havoc were low across 87% of the Earth’s surface.

Unfortunately for the dinosaurs, the 9km-wide asteroid thumped into the ground in what is now Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, where the concentration
of hydrocarbons in the rocks was so high that the soot and sulphate aerosols sent into the sky caused global cooling and drought. The impact crater
near the town of Chicxulub is 180km wide and 20km deep.


A glimpse of when Canada's badlands were a lush dinosaur forest by the sea
Read more
Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, Kunio Kaiho and Naga Oshima at Tohoku University in Japan describe calculations that suggest only 13%
of the Earth’s surface harboured rich enough hydrocarbon deposits to cause a mass extinction in the event of such a devastating impact.

Surprising Results from October's Triton Cover-Up - Sky & Telescope
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/surprising-results-from-octobers-triton-occultation/

By watching a star disappear behind Triton, one of Saturn's moons, astronomers learned about the state of its ultrathin atmosphere.

For those of us who keep track of where and when solar-system objects occult a background star, the brief cover-up of a dim star in
Aquarius by Neptune’s large moon Triton on October 5th was especially newsworthy.

The target, 12.6-magnitude star UCAC4 410-143659, was the brightest star occulted by Triton since 1997. It’s about a magnitude
brighter than Triton itself, and its location only 13 arcseconds from 8th-magnitude Neptune made observations relatively easy.