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No,
that's not a meteor or an alien spaceship - that's an image of the falling
NASA satellite UARS, captured by amateur astronomer Thierry Legault:
The six-tonne, 20-year-old spacecraft has fallen out of orbit and is expected to crash somewhere on Earth on or around 24 September.
The US space agency says the risk to life from the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is 1 in 3,200. [...] Nasa says that most of the satellite will break or burn up before reaching Earth.
But scientists have identified 26 separate pieces that could survive the fall through the atmosphere. This debris could rain across an area 400-500km (250-310 miles) wide.
Link | Thierry's webpage (Image: Thierry Legault)
This image of Manhattan was taken by the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) aboard the Landsat 7 satellite, about 27 hours after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. It was uploaded to Flickr only a couple of hours ago. Link -via Gizmodo
(Image credit: Flickr user NASA Goddard Photo and Video)
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The planned UNESCOSat mission — a UN-owned satellite that will conduct low-gravity experiments — will examine whether or not the Shewanella MR-1 bacterium can convert human feces into a fuel that can be used on long-range spaceflights:
The goal is, to put it bluntly, to see if Shewanella can convert astronaut feces into hydrogen for use in onboard fuel cells. “The bacteria generates hydrogen. If we give waste to bacteria, it converts to hydrogen that could be used in a fuel cell. We’re looking at how reliable the bacteria are,” explains Donald Platt, the Program Director for the Space Sciences and Space Systems Program at the Florida Institute of Technology. Shewanella’s viability will be determined based on its growth rate in space–figuring out, in other words, how different its life cycle is in space than it is on Earth.
Link | Image: Fast Company
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The Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 satellites are sending back images of Earth in false color. Not only are they useful to scientists and cartographers, but they can also be called works of art. The image here shows phytoplankton swirling around the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Yes, I thought of Van Gogh’s Starry Night when I saw this as well as you did. See 22 such images at Wired. Link
This map, or geoid, shows the contours of the earth in a more precise manner than ever before. It was constructed with measurements taken by Europe’s Goce satellite.
Launched in 2009, the sleek satellite flies pole to pole at an altitude of just 254.9km – the lowest orbit of any research satellite in operation today.
The spacecraft carries three pairs of precision-built platinum blocks inside its gradiometer instrument that sense accelerations which are as small as 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000 of the gravity experienced on Earth.
This has allowed it to map the almost imperceptible differences in the pull exerted by the mass of the planet from one place to the next – from the great mountain ranges to the deepest ocean trenches.
Two months of observations have now been fashioned into what scientists call the geoid.
This technology allows mapping of places that were too inaccessible for such precision before, such as the Himalayas. The BBC has a lot more on this project. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
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Neatoramanauts, here’s your chance to play armchair archaeologist. Our friends over at the National Geographic is crowdsourcing a project to identify archaeological treasures in Mongolia using satellite imagery (via the GeoEye Foundation) and other modern tools.
The goal of Valley of the Khans Project is to identify archaeological sites, but the fun part is that you get to participate in a real-time treasure hunt. The project is led by Dr. Albert Yu-Min Lin, a dashing real-life Indiana Jones who’s looking for the lost tomb of Genghis Khan:
Hello fellow explorers!
The entire Valley of the Khans team is very excited to begin the expedition to Mongolia but, for me, the adventure begins today. By enlisting the help of thousands of "virtual explorers" like you, we can start to uncover the mysteries of the Valley of the Khans right now!
The area that we will be exploring has been untouched for more than 800 years. There are no maps, no roadsigns and no one to ask for directions. But we’ve scanned the landscape with super high-resolution satellite imagery. By participating in the online exploration on this site, YOU can join our team by examining these satellite images and searching for clues that will guide our quest to discover the lost tomb of Genghis Khan. Maybe you’ll map out roads and rivers that our expedition can follow to make our way through this inhospitable territory. Perhaps you can identify traces of a nomad’s ger that might be a good place for us to camp. Or maybe you’ll see the buried outline of an ancient tomb that could be the clue we’re searching for…
So don’t let your computer have all the fun looking for aliens on its spare time, check it out and play archaeologist in the homeland of Genghis Khan from the comfort of your own home.
Links: Project Main Page | About the Expedition | Project Blog with daily updates – Thanks Marilyn!
More photos after the jump: more …
This infographic by Michael Paukner shows which nations have how many satellites in orbit around the earth. Information is sorted by functionality. You can view a larger image at the link.
NASA’s Earth Observatory has some amazing satellite photos of the deforestation of the Amazonian rainforest over the past 8 years. At the link, click on the years posted below the picture to see the progression.
The state of Rondônia in western Brazil is one of the most deforested parts of the Amazon. In the past three decades, clearing and degradation of the state’s original 208,000 square kilometers of forest (about 51.4 million acres, an area slightly smaller than the state of Kansas) has been rapid: 4,200 square kilometers cleared by 1978; 30,000 by 1988; and 53,300 by 1998. By 2003, an estimated 67,764 square kilometers of rainforest—an area larger than the state of West Virginia—had been cleared.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by liquidanbar.
Today it’s exactly 50 years since the Soviet Union launched their Sputnik 1 – the world’s first artificial satellite to be put into geocentric orbit.
Link [Wikipedia] – via Prylfeber
