New Evidence Suggests Mars Had Lakes Of Water For Thousands Of Years | IFLScience
http://www.iflscience.com/space/mars-had-lakes-water-thousands-years-says-study

A new paper in the journal Science suggests that large impact craters like Gale were capable of storing water for thousands of years in the Martian past. The theory is based on studying clinoforms, the ordering of sediments on the bed of the ancient lake. The paper suggests that the surface of the crater basin rose over time, caused by the deposit of sediment. Some of this would have come from the northern crater wall, where gravel and sand were moved south in shallow streams. And eventually, wind-driven erosion dumped deposits in the center of the crater, forming Mount Sharp.

“This intracrater lake system probably existed intermittently for thousands to millions of years, implying a relatively wet climate that supplied moisture to the crater rim and transported sediment via streams into the lake basin,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

Naprostá paráda! Všechny části hlavní konstrukce, segmenty zrcadla, dokonce i přídavné součásti pro montáž zrcadel JWST jsou už
na jednom místě v Greenbeltu v Goddardově středisku. V příštích týdnech a měsících se můžeme těšit na další velký krok -
začne montáž 18 segmentů primárního zrcadla k nosné konstrukci! Když vše půjde dobře, příští rok začnou kompletní testy.

Think of this: consider the area of a sphere with the radius of the Kuiper Belt. And consider that even with a very low density of planetoids, given the area of the sphere there are potentially hundreds or even thousands of Pluto-, Charon-, Eris- or Sedna-class objects in existence. Greatly outnumbering the population of the terrestrial or gas-giant planets. So the conditions we are seeing at Pluto and Charon are to be considered the norm, and our rocky sun-huggers are the anomalies.

My esoterica for the month...

--Bill

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=8071&view=findpost&p=227137

New Horizons Finds Blue Skies and Water Ice on Pluto
http://www.nasa.gov/nh/nh-finds-blue-skies-and-water-ice-on-pluto

The first color images of Pluto’s atmospheric hazes, returned by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft last week, reveal that the hazes are blue.

“Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado.



In a second significant finding, New Horizons has detected numerous small, exposed regions of water ice on Pluto. The discovery was made from data collected by the Ralph spectral composition mapper on New Horizons. 

The tech billionaires are wrong. We are never going to have cities on Mars. | Fusion
http://fusion.net/story/209348/no-life-on-mars/

The absurdity of building cities on Mars or in orbit is not a strictly technical one. In fact I do not doubt that it will be within our grasp in the not-so-distant future. The problem is not whether Buzz Aldrin’s plan for gravity-assisted transit to Mars (aka the Aldrin Cycler) is feasible or not; instead, it’s a matter of history and sociology. Getting to Mars may be within our grasp in the not-so-distant future, but the idea that people will want to go en masse is highly unlikely. It is not the engineering or the astronautics of space colonization that deserves dismantling, but its very premise.

SNC's Dream Chaser® Cargo System: A Transportation System to Deliver Cargo to the ISS for NASA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHvBUqfWDRs

CLUMP:
ESOcast 77: Mysterious Ripples Found Racing Through Planet-forming Disc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hF3irBxMSM

Sol 1119 - průběh vrtání



Sol 1126 - poslední autoportrét. Autor mozaiky: Kevin M. Gill

ESOcast 77: Mysterious Ripples Found Racing Through Planet-forming Disc | ESO
https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1538a/

Images from ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have revealed unique and totally unexpected structures in the dusty disc around the star AU Microscopii. These fast-moving wave-like dust features are unlike anything ever observed, or even predicted, before now.

These Mysterious Blazing-Fast Ripples Racing Around a Star Defy Explanation
http://www.space.com/30765-mysterious-ripples-around-star-defy-explanation.html

"Kepler-442b is more habitable than Earth" - genialni titulek, clanek uz zas tak informativni neni a na paper jsem nemel cas ani chut

Kepler-442b more habitable than Earth, according to new scale (Wired UK)
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-10/07/kepler-442b-more-habitable-earth

51 Pegasi b: The first exoplanet discovered orbiting a Sun-like star.
http://www.slate.com/...06/_51_pegasi_b_the_first_exoplanet_discovered_orbiting_a_sun_like_star.html

Twenty years ago, on this very date, the field of astronomy underwent a magnificent revolution. On Oct. 6, 1995, Swiss astronomers Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor announced they had discovered a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star.

This was the very first time a planet was seen orbiting a “normal” star. Planets had previously been discovered around pulsars—the compact and furiously energetic cores of stars that had exploded. But it’s thought that the planets may have formed after the supernova event that created the pulsar, and besides, pulsars are nothing at all like the Sun.

NASA dokončila úspěšné testy mechanického uhlíkového tepelného štítu ADEPT
(Adaptive Deployable Entry and Placement Technology) pro budoucí mise:
http://www.nasa.gov/...completes-successful-heat-shield-testing-for-future-mars-exploration-vehicles

Malé plutónské měsíce Nix a Hydra: