Outer Space Stuff

A research team funded by NASA has made a momentous discovery: arsenic-based life. Kind of.

According to this NASA news feature, common Gammaproteobacteria from California's Mono Lake (a body of water known for its alkalinity and hypersalinity) were grown in a laboratory "on a diet that was very lean on phosphorus, but included generous helpings of arsenic." Researchers eventually removed the phosphorus altogether, substituting it with arsenic. This resulted in the bacteria continuing to grow, having incorporated that arsenic into its DNA.

What makes this truly astounding is that up until today's announcement, life with a chemical composition outside the confines of the phosphorus/carbon/nitrogen/oxygen/hydrogen/sulfur ensemble existed only in the realm of science fiction. However, as is the case with many things these days, science fiction is fast becoming science fact.

Related Links:

http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/articles/thriving-on-arsenic/

Beginning today (Thursday, Dec 2) at 2 p.m. EST, NASA will hold a news conference "to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life."

The news conference will be broadcast live on NASA TV and streamed (live) on its website.

The full media advisory can be seen here.

After observing Gliese 581 (a red dwarf star 20 light years from Earth) for more than a decade via Hawaii's Keck Observatory, a research team comprised of members from UC Santa Cruz and the Carnegie Institution of Washington have finally hit pay dirt. By using a technique called Doppler spectroscopy, the team has discovered a planet (GJ 581g) that is "squarely in the middle of the habitable zone of the star", a minimum of 3.1 times the mass of Earth and most likely rocky.

A somewhat awkward (albeit informative) press release can be seen here.

The immediate implications of this discovery are that potentially habitable planets (i.e., Earth-sized, rocky and orbiting within a star's habitable zone) are likely to be abundant throughout the universe. With extrasolar planet detection in its infancy, and with a relatively small sample already yielding a return, such an assumption seems sound.

At any rate, the Kepler Mission will soon give us an even better idea of how many potentially habitable planets might actually exist.

Starting Wednesday, Sept. 29 at 1 p.m. EDT, NASA will stream a live teleconference discussing recent finds of the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft.

The IBEX mission studies the structure of our heliosphere and how it interacts with what is known as the local interstellar medium, a detailed diagram of which can be seen here.

Three members of Expedition 24 (Alexander Skvortsov, Mikhail Kornienko and Tracy Caldwell Dyson) will be leaving the ISS tonight and are scheduled to land in Kazakhstan on Sept 24 at 12:55 a.m. EDT.

Having launched on April 2, 2010, all three have been in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for nearly six months.

As of 6:56 p.m. EDT, the hatch to the Soyuz has been reported closed and preparations for undocking are currently underway.

Undocking itself is scheduled for 9:35 p.m. and can be seen live, along with full event coverage on NASA TV.

UPDATE: As of 7:15 p.m. EDT, hatch closure problems on the ISS side are being reported. Leak checks underway to verify effective seal.

UPDATE (2): As of 9:35 p.m. EDT, undocking has been delayed due to non-operational hooks on the Poisk module of the ISS. 

It outshone everything else in the late evening sky. And it was moving...

It took mere seconds for me to recognize the object for what it was. I quickly ran inside the house to grab my girlfriend, who had never laid eyes on an orbiting satellite or spacecraft before. When I finally got her outside, the International Space Station (ISS) was almost directly overhead, moving towards the NE.

Personally, I thought it was grand. Not only did we, as a species, put it up there, but actual members of the species are currently living up there! I babbled on for several seconds regarding these intrepid men and women, but to no effect. Unmoved by my sentiment, she muttered a mostly disinterested "cool" and proceeded to question the authenticity of the sighting, believing in the possibility of this brilliantly shining, fast-moving object being nothing more than a common aircraft.

This prompted me (once the ISS faded from view) to go straight to nasa.gov and to pull up the sighting information for proof. Needless to say, it took mere seconds for her to recognize the object for what it was...

Finally, the aforementioned webpage is a great resource for ISS sighting information. Simply enter your country, region, then your city for upcoming viewing times. Speaking of which, I'm off to see the next one here.

Happy viewing everyone.