Some Call Me Nature...

“Some call me Nature. Others call me Mother Nature.
I’ve been here for over 4 and a half billion years. 22.500 times longer than you.
I don’t really need people, but people need me.
Yes, your future depends on me.
When I thrive you thrive. When I falter you falter…Or worse.
But I’ve been here for eons.
I have fed species greater than you. And I have starved species greater than you.
My oceans, my soil, my flowing streams and my forests.
They all can take you—or leave you…
How you choose to live each day weather you regard or disregard me, doesn’t really matter to me.
One way or the other…Your actions will determine your fate. Not mine.
I’m Nature. I’ll go on. I am prepared to evolve.
Are you?”

Julia Robert’s and an other 9 A-list movie stars donated their time and intonations to a stunning public awareness movies evolving the human race dangers of suffering a massive die-off extinction.

The two minutes short films pretend to reach every human being and reflect on the several pure elements of our Planet. Water, Ice, Forests, asking globally why humans pay so little attention to the hazards posed by overpopulation, environmental pollution, deforestation, biodiversity degradation, overheated climate, and other ecological pressures.

Humans are asked here to pay attention to the alarming signs and react before it’s too late.
This is not about saving Nature.

This is about saving Ourselves. 

The Human Race.

MARS - The next WORLD

KEPLER-186f

Credits: NASA

Astronomers on their searching for Earth like planets have discovered a twin Earth-sized exoplanet caller Kepler-186f. Its radius is 11% larger than Earth and the planet orbits a star habitable zone, 492 light-years from our planet.

The distance does not ensure if its atmospheric characteristics make it a potential habitable planet or not. That will have to be postponent until the next instruments and spacecraft generation can focuses on outer space exoplanets.

Kepler - 186f is part of a solar system with five planets, hosting a star which has only 4% of our Sun's luminosity. Their proximity to the star makes all the planets too hot for living as we understand it, with slower rotations and longer days that could last for weeks or months.

JUPITER - The STORMY GIANT

JUPITER - The Stormy Giant
Credits NASA

At about 89,000 miles in diameter, Jupiter could swallow 1,000 Earths. It is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. 

Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere. Such winds sustain spinning anticyclones like the Great Red Spot -- a raging storm three and a half times the size of Earth located in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. 

In January and February 1979, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft zoomed toward Jupiter, capturing hundreds of images during its approach, including this close-up of swirling clouds around Jupiter's Great Red Spot. This image was assembled from three black and white negatives.

Credits NASA

Saturn MOON ENCELATUS - A Distante Frozen World

Credits: NASA spacecraft CASSINI

CASSINI the unmanned spacecraft launched in 1997 to orbit planet SATURN and its multiple MOONS has arrived, 7 years later, to Saturn system in 2004. 

Since then, Saturn and its many natural satellites have been studied and observed as well as their heliosphere, testing the famous Einstein theory of relativity.

On its way, Cassini captured this still and partially sunlit ENCELADUS, a Saturnian MOON covered in ice that reflects sunlight similar to freshly fallen snow, making ENCELADUS one of the most reflective objects in the solar system. The blue color in this false-color image indicates larger-than-average ice particles. The moon's surface is decorated with fractures, folds and ridges caused by tectonic stresses. 

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 7, 2010, using filters sensitive to ultraviolet, visible and infrared light.

What about 2014 SPACE MISSIONS?

NASA and ESA presented their main missions for 2014.

More than 24 are active at the moment and others will be launched during this year.

Mission: ROSETTA

ROSETTA is being classified as THE one great expectation mission.
Since 2004 when Rosetta was launched, ESA has been waiting for the right moment to catch an enormous comet, land there and take as many samples and pictures as possible. Rosetta will be the "big star" of 2014, making the first-ever orbit insertion at a comet in August and attempting a landing on it in November. Images will be spectacular for sure! See the film.

In MARS two more spacecraft will be launched and they will arrived at the red planet in September 2014. Japan is also following space targets with theirs HAYABUSA mission.

MESSENGER will go on its mission to Venus and Mercury until 2015.

The twin ARTEMIS spacecraft are still happily operating at the Moon and will continue to do so through 2014.

LADEE is in its prime mission and is planned to crash into the lunar surface in March. No lengthy mission extension is possible for this mission -- its low orbit, necessary for sampling the lunar atmosphere, is a death sentence.

CURIOSITY in Mars has only one goal: TO DRIVE as much as possible in order to explore Mars soil.By the summer of 2014 the rover should be approaching the Murray Buttes, a gap between the basalt sand dunes that will allow them passage to the clay-bearing rocks they landed in Gale crater to explore.

ODYSSEY and MARS EXPRESS have had the most serious problems, but continue to do great imaging and (in the case of Odyssey) valuable relay work. Mars Express' mission is extended through 2016.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has developed a spectacular routine of wider-field imaging with its Context Camera with rapid followup of any new features with high-resolution HiRISE images, so I hope to see more new discoveries of fresh impact craters, possible water-carved features, moving sand dunes, and other geomorphology that shows Mars to be an active planet.

OPPORTUNUTY, will have its moment this winter. The rover's activities will be limited by low power. However, they have found themselves a nice north-facing slope to tilt the solar panels at the winter Sun, so they shouldn't have to park for long stretches; they'll make brief journeys from one north-facing "lily pad" to another, exploring Murray Ridge.

CASSINI, in Saturn in planned to have 11 gravity-assist flybys of Titan. All of 2014 will be spent in an inclined phase from which it can observe the effects of springtime sun on the north poles of Titan and Saturn and image the rings, while exploring the magnetosphere and plasma environment of Saturn in three dimensions. Cassini will not return to an equatorial orbit (and frequent opportunities to observe the other moons) until March of 2015. However, Cassini is currently under very real threat of cancellation. If its mission is to be ended in 2015, then a propulsive maneuver to set up that ending will be performed in 2014, canceling all those carefully-laid plans. So for Cassini the most important events of 2014 will be taking place here on Earth, in the halls of Congress and the White House.

ICE will fly past Earth in August. If we want to regain control of this aged-but-still-perfectly-good spacecraft, we must do it early this year. The budget mess is making that seem difficult to achieve. I'll report if I have any further news on that.

Juno, Dawn, and New Horizons will spend 2014 cruising to their next destinations. The latter two will be setting the stage for a spectacular 2015, what I'm calling the Year of the Dwarf Planet, when we will turn three round worlds from astronomical objects to geological objects for the first time: Ceres, Pluto, and Charon.

Voyagers 1 and 2 will be carrying their missions on, into the interstellar medium.

I'll keep on track of their important goals.

from here

MARS CURIOSITY - Was "Gale Crater" a LAKE?

Since last year, I've been following, with great enthusiasm, the Mission of the Mars Curiosity Rover, a scienthific Laboratory which was planned to determine whether the Red Planet ever was, or is, habitable to microbial life.

The mission, has been a success, compared with all the precedent which many ended in a frustrating manner with engine or technical failures beyond remote repair from NASA Earth basis.

On this mission it was placed the most advanced technologically ever built on a rover. 

After a successfully landing, on August 5th/2012, in Mars' Gale Crater, following a series of complicated landing maneuvers never before attempted, the Rover, (which is about the size of a MINI Cooper), equipped with 17 cameras and a robotic arm containing a suite of specialised laboratory-like tools and instruments, started its work analysing and sending outstanding information to NASA culminating, on the last 2 weeks, with informations that allowed scientists to conclude that Mars was, some million years ago, a planet with water and, why not, where existed some incipient forms of life.

Photo taken by the Curiosity rover shows mudstone that suggests planet's Gale crater held ancient lake.
- Science/AAAS -

At a press conference today, scientists announced that the Curiosity rover had uncovered signs of an ancient freshwater lake on Mars that may have teemed with tiny organisms with tens of millions years, far longer than scientists had imagined. The watering hole near the Martian equator existed about 3.5 billion years ago. Scientists say it was neither salty nor acidic, and contained nutrients — a perfect spot to support microbes very similar to those depots found on our Earth Oceans.

Looking for some explanations for Mars' desertification, scientists also believe that the origins of some drastic climate changes may have been due to the fact that Mars lost its magnetic shield, leaving the Planet vulnerable to solar and cosmic radiation. 

Over the time, the ionizing rays took apart what was believed to have been a thick, protective atmosphere which kept Mars warm and wet.

I'll be posting, whenever some great news about the mission comes out!

CASSINI Mission: EARTH seen from SATURN

The cameras on NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this rare look at Earth and its moon from Saturn orbit on July 19, 2013. Taken while performing a large wide-angle mosaic of the entire Saturn ring system, narrow-angle camera images were deliberately inserted into the sequence in order to image Earth and its moon. This is the second time that Cassini has imaged Earth from within Saturn's shadow, and only the third time ever that our planet has been imaged from the outer solar system.

Earth is the blue point of light on the left; the moon is fainter, white, and on the right. Both are seen here through the faint, diffuse E ring of Saturn. Earth was brighter than the estimated brightness used to calculate the narrow-angle camera exposure times. Hence, information derived from the wide-angle camera images was used to process this color composite.

Credits: NASA

NEPTUNE ' s 14th MOON - S/2004 N 1

Diagram showing NEPTUNE' MOONS

This diagram shows the orbits of several Neptune moons. All of them were discovered in 1989 by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, with the exception of S/2004 N 1, which was discovered in archival Hubble Space Telescope images taken from 2004 to 2009. 

The moons all follow prograde orbits and are nestled among Neptune's rings (not shown).

The outer moon Triton was discovered in 1846 — the same year the planet itself was discovered. Triton's orbit is retrograde, suggesting it is a captured Kuiper Belt object and therefore a distant cousin of Pluto. The inner moons may have formed after Triton's capture several billion years ago.

In the summer of 1989,  NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft snapped a lot of pictures during its brief flyby over Nepturn. The prolific probe discovered several moons orbiting close to the blue-green planet.

While analyzing Neptune photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomer Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute noticed an extra white dot about 65,400 miles from Neptune, located between the orbits of the moons Larissa and Proteus. 

This allowed him to plot a circular orbit for the moon, designated S/2004 N 1, which completes one revolution around Neptune every 23 hours. His discovery raises the number of known moons orbiting Neptune to 14.

Image Type: Illustration - Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

CURIOSITY - FIRST MARS SOIL ANALYSIS

This is a view of the third (left) and fourth (right) trenches made by the 1.6-inch-wide (4-centimeter-wide) scoop on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity in October 2012. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS 

Mars Curiosity rover has used its full array of instruments to analyze Martian soil for the first time, and found a complex chemistry within the Martian soil. Water and sulfur and chlorine-containing substances, among other ingredients, showed up in samples Curiosity's arm delivered to an analytical laboratory inside the rover.

Detection of the substances during this early phase of the mission demonstrates the laboratory's capability to analyze diverse soil and rock samples over the next two years. Scientists also have been verifying the capabilities of the rover's instruments.

Curiosity is the first Mars rover able to scoop soil into analytical instruments. The specific soil sample came from a drift of windblown dust and sand called "Rocknest." The site lies in a relatively flat part of Gale Crater still miles away from the rover's main destination on the slope of a mountain called Mount Sharp. 

"We have no definitive detection of Martian organics at this point, but we will keep looking in the diverse environments of Gale Crater," 

said SAM Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity to assess whether areas inside Gale Crater ever offered a habitable environment for microbes. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, a division of Caltech, manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, and built Curiosity. more here

SATURN B Ring

Saturn B Ring

Cassini continues its space exploration sending extraordinary images from Saturn's rings.

Here we see a glorious B ring with its dense layers and various structures which have been one of the subjects which scientists have been looking up to.

Saturn's B ring is the densest and most massive of all the rings. The C ring is also visible inside the B ring and the A ring puts on an appearance beyond the Cassini Division near the top and bottom of the image.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 22, 2012.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 201,000 miles (324,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 134 degrees. Image scale is 10 miles (16 kilometers) per pixel.   from here

EXOPLANETS - Possible Habitable Worlds

Exoplanets

This image shows a composition of all the current potential habitable exoplanets candidates in the catalog. The exoplanets are ranked by similarity to Earth from best to worst, #1 being the best candidate.

The only two confirmed exoplanets in the data, HD 85512 b and Gliese 581 d, still rank very low as compared to the NASA Kepler candidates, that are waiting confirmation.  from here

Cassini - TITAN Reveals an HIDDEN OCEAN at DEPTH

This artist's concept shows a possible scenario for the internal structure of Titan, as suggested by data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Image credit: A. Tavani

PASADENA, Calif. - Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have revealed Saturn's moon Titan likely harbors a layer of liquid water under its ice shell.

Researchers saw a large amount of squeezing and stretching as the moon orbited Saturn. They deduced that if Titan were composed entirely of stiff rock, the gravitational attraction of Saturn would cause bulges, or solid "tides," on the moon only 3 feet (1 meter) in height. Spacecraft data show Saturn creates solid tides approximately 30 feet (10 meters) in height, which suggests Titan is not made entirely of solid rocky material. The finding appears in today's edition of the journal Science.

"Cassini's detection of large tides on Titan leads to the almost inescapable conclusion that there is a hidden ocean at depth," said Luciano Iess, the paper's lead author and a Cassini team member at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. "The search for water is an important goal in solar system exploration, and now we've spotted another place where it is abundant."   from here

CASSINI - A Long Mission to SATURN

For the last 15 years, since October 15th, 1997 Cassini Mission has been exploring Saturn, its Moons and Rings. Astonishing images were captured by Cassini and much of the Big unknown planet is nowadays widely covered with thousands of infra red pictures which opened our knowledge and clarified many of Saturn mysteries. Scientists could see frozen lakes, mountains, small and huge moons,  furious storms and rings that seemed to float on Saturn's gas atmosphere.

Cassini spacecraft views SATURN rings and TITAN its biggest Moon

TITAN the biggest Saturn's moon was extensively explored and incredible shoots were captured, like this one where the BIG MOON relays in the center of the image, with its 5,150 km, across. 

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on 15 Jan. 2011 using a combination of polarized and spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 844,000 km from Titan. 

Image scale is 50 km per pixel.

CURIOSITY Mission - Landing on MARS

I've been following the CURIOSITY MISSION since it landed on Mars surface, last August 6th, 2012. 

Produced by Bard Canning and working frame-by-frame, I found this spectacular HD film based on the original shoots during the CURIOSITY landing.

Canning produced this film in ultra-resolution, smooth-motion, detail-enhanced, color-corrected, interpolated from the original 4 frames per second to 30 frames per second. 

This video plays real-time at the speed that Curiosity descended to the surface last Mars on August 6th, 2012.

Mars Curiosity Rover

Dione - A Moon Full of Light Oxygen, Right Near Saturn

 This view highlights tectonic faults and craters on Saturn's moon, Dione, an icy world that has undoubtedly experienced geologic activity since its formation. 

Credit : Based on images taken from Cassini's spacecraft, taken on Dec. 24, 2005.

An Oxygen atmosphere was discovered far away, on the ringed planet's Saturn icy moon Dione.

But this will not be human's last escape once Dione's atmosphere is unbreathable with its 5 trillion times less dense air than we are used to at Earth's surface, scientists say.

Althought breathing would be impossible for humans,

Dione's atmosphere was detected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which spotted an ultra-thin layer of oxygen ions so sparse that it is equivalent to conditions 300 miles (480 kilometers) above Earth.

"We now know that Dione, in addition to Saturn's rings and the moon Rhea, is a source of oxygen molecules. This shows that molecular oxygen is actually common in the Saturn system and reinforces that it can come from a process that doesn't involve life." scientists said last Friday.    from here

GJ 1214b - A Super Water Planet - 40 Light Years from Earth

Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Aguilar (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

GJ1214b, shown in this artist's view, is a super-Planet orbiting, every 38 hours, a red dwarf star, at a distance of 2 million kilometres, which makes it hot with an estimated temperature of 230 degrees Celsius.

Found in 2009, scientists said, last week, that new observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope showed that GJ 1214b is a water world enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere, representing a new type of planet,  like nothing seen in the solar system or any other planetary system currently known.

Most of its mass is made of water. 

Located 40 light-years from our Planet, it's huge size is estimated in 2.7 times the Earth's diameter with as much as seven times Earth's weigh.  from here

Mars Swings into Opposition

It's called the "Mars Opposition"and the name means that Mars and the Sun are on, well, opposite sides of us. It happens only once every two years and two months, and last Saturday, March 3d was the big day.

Next week there's a promise of great time, if you have a backyard telescope.

Why don't you point it out to the Moon and Mars and swing it between the two?

 After last Saturday's March 3d, the day of the "Mars Opposition" I'm sure you'll have a clue about the all three well aligned. from here

The not so Quiet Moon - Blue Planet's Best Friend

The largest of the newly found graben, in highlands on the moon's far side.

Image courtesy ASU/SI/NASA

Images caught by NASA discovered some cracks on the Moon's surface. Scientists have always thought that the moon had no seismic activity, but nothing could be more wrong.

Actually, according to a new study, based on NASA images, the moon's surface wasn't at all quiet out there staring at Earth. In that lonely wilderness, the little Blue Planet's friend has been on a discrete activity, which surprisingly has stretched apart its surface forming shallow, sunken valleys, suggesting that the moon has undergone relatively recent tectonic activity, within the past 50 million years or so.

That activity in turn hints that the moon may not have been entirely melted, when it first formed roughly, 4.6 billion years ago. Instead, the early moon likely had a solid core covered by a global ocean of molten rock from here.

(Related: "Earth Had Two Moons, New Model Suggests.")

Kepler Findings - 26 New Planets

Credit: NASA Ames/D. Fabrycky, UC Santa Cruz/J. Steffen, Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysic

NASA’s Kepler mission announced the discovery of 26 new planets (above, green). The new worlds, comparable to the giant planets of our solar system (blue), nearly double the number of planets previously discovered by the probe (red), but it’s probably only a small taste of what’s to come.

Kepler looks at 150,000 distant stars and searches for tiny changes in brightness as a planet passes by. So far, the probe has turned up 2,300 planet candidates. Confirming a planet is far more difficult, but Kepler has managed to verify the new worlds announced today by measuring slight changes in their orbits due to the gravitational influence of other, nearby planets.

Kepler’s ultimate goal is to discover another earth orbiting a distant star. That goal is still some years off, but it’s already contributing quite a lot towards our understanding of exoplanetary systems. An abundance of mid-sized planets has forced astronomers to rethink their theories of planetary formation, and the mission’s precise measurements of star brightness has shown that some stars are far more turbulent than are sun.  - from here