Well, NASA’s Valentine’s date seems to have gone off without a hitch. Last night the Stardust-NExT probe passed within 110 miles of the comet Tempel 1, and snapped plenty of pictures during its rendezvous. The mission’s main objective was to record the results of an experiment conducted by another spacecraft, Deep Impact, which hurled an impactor at Tempel 1 back in 2005. Researchers hoped Stardust would catch a glimpse of the man-made crater.

As Phil Plait writes:

The whole point here was to see the impact crater from 2005, and Stardust was able to do that. It’s difficult to see in these images here, but Pete Schultz, an impact specialist with the mission, said the crater is about 150 meters across and has a central peak, indicating material fell back to the comet. The crater wasn’t as obvious as expected, but is about the right size given the impactor speed, mass, and angle of impact.

Head over to Bad Astronomy for more details, and for a nice animation of the flyby.

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Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell

No, you can’t see a black hole. What you might be able to see, though, is the way in which relativity predicts a spinning black hole will bend space, time, and light around it. Scientists say in a new study in Nature Physics that they are closer than ever to being able to see this effect in faraway black holes from our vantage point here on Earth.

Galaxies probably have spinning, supermassive black holes at their center, and spinning black holes possess two types of angular momentum, study coauthor Bo Thide explains. There’s spin angular momentum, which is analogous to what the Earth creates as it spins on its axis, and there’s orbital angular momentum, which is analogous to what the Earth creates as it orbits the sun. Thidé says that the second effect—orbital angular momentum—distorts light in a way that scientists who know what to look for might be able to see it from here.

“Around a spinning black hole, space and time behave in such an odd way; space becomes time, time becomes space, and the whole space-time is actually dragged around the black hole, becomes twisted around the black hole,” Professor Thidé explained. “If you have radiation source… it will then sense this twisting of spacetime itself. The light ray may think that ‘I’m propagating in a straight line’, but if you look at it from the outside, you see it’s propagating along a spiral line. That’s relativity for you.” [BBC News]

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Six years ago, NASA visited the comet Tempel 1 with a fury: Its Deep Impact mission launched a projectile into the comet that kicked up dust and ice for the spacecraft to capture as a sample. Tonight, NASA is taking another pass by the comet—but a little more gently this time.

The hardy Stardust explorer, which has passed by other comets and brought samples back to Earth, will pass by Tempel 1 tonight to try to get a good look at what NASA’s blast did to the comet. Last time around, Deep Impact’s projectile was actually too effective. It blasted so much debris off the comet that it blinded itself.

Now, Stardust will be able to obtain images of that crater up close for the first time. Moreover, in the nearly six years since that initial encounter, the comet has completed an orbit around the solar system, passing close to the sun. “For the first time, we’ll go back to see what happens to a comet” after it passes close to the sun, said Pete Schultz of Brown University, a scientist for the new mission, which has been dubbed Stardust-NExT. [Los Angeles Times]

Stardust’s pass presents an opportunity not just to see what’s changed in the last five to six years of the comet’s life, but also to peel back more of Tempel 1‘s ancient history.

“Here’s a chance where we can see what has changed, how much has changed,” said Joseph Veverka, a professor of astronomy at Cornell and the mission’s principal investigator, “so we’ll start unraveling the history of a comet’s surface.” For example, photographs taken by Deep Impact in 2005 showed areas that looked old and others that seemed much younger. But the snapshots did not tell the ages of any of them. “We have no idea whether we’re talking about things that have been there for a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years,” Dr. Veverka said. [The New York Times]

The flyby is scheduled to begin at about 11:30 p.m. Eastern tonight (Monday). Stardust should pass within about 125 miles of the comet, taking snapshots of the cosmic traveler and also catching some of the particles flying off it. The approach will mark the first time two spacecraft have studied the same comet up close, and probably mark the last hurrah for Stardust: After returning with samples from the comet Wild 2 in 2004, the craft was still running fine and got the OK from NASA to go on this second comet chase. But after a dozen years in space logging billions of millions, Stardust will soon be, simply, out of fuel.

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Image: NASA

One private space company says it may claim a portion of the coveted Google Lunar X Prize in the near future–all it has to do is land a robot on the moon, travel roughly 1,640 feet, and then send data back to Earth.

The company, Astrobotic Technology, announced this week that it’s getting serious about the moon mission–it reserved a seat for its robot on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Currently scheduled to launch in December 2013, the rocket will shuttle the company’s Red Rover to lunar orbit, where Astrobotic Technology hopes to complete the tasks set for it to claim $24 million of the $30 million prize.

So far, this is how the itinerary should play out:

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The Ares I rocket, scrapped during President Obama‘s overhaul of NASA, may be making a comeback. Two rocket-makers say that they have reached a plan to salvage the design of Ares I and use it to compete in the private competition to provide post-shuttle space taxi service to NASA.

The partners are Alliant Techsystems of Minneapolis (ATK) and the European company Astrium, which builds Ariane 5 rockets to carry satellites into space. Today they are announcing their collaboration on the new 300-foot rocket.

The new rocket, named Liberty, would be much cheaper than the Ares I, because the unfinished NASA-designed upper stage of the Ares I would be replaced with the first stage of the Ariane 5, which has been launched successfully 41 consecutive times. The lower stage of the Liberty, a longer version of the shuttle booster built by ATK, would be almost unchanged from the Ares I. [The New York Times]

To truly go ahead with the project, the two companies will need to snag at least some of the $200 million in funding NASA is set to give next month to private companies developing space taxi technology. Giants like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as newer private space companies like SpaceX, are all competing for these dollars and contracts.

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The twin satellites have taken their positions, and now we get to see something we’ve never seen before: the whole sun, all at once.

The pair of observers that make up NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) have been traveling since 2006 to reach opposite sides of our star, and they just beamed back the first 360-degree solar images.

The satellites are in the same orbital path as Earth, more or less, and have just taken up their final positions — one is where we’ll be in three months, and the other where we were three months ago. (The first has NASA’s least imaginative name to date: STEREO A, for “ahead.” The second is called STEREO B, for…you can probably guess.) [TIME]

Seeing the far side of the sun isn’t just a scientific curiosity. It could also helps researchers figure out the sun’s violent outbursts, like the coronal mass ejections that could endanger astronauts and foul up satellites if one headed for Earth.

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Across the far northern regions of Mars, a sea of dunes dots the red landscape, continuing on for thousands of miles. At first glance they appear like fossils of geography—reminders of a time when Mars was vivacious and windswept that now find themselves encrusted and stationary.

Looks can be deceiving. A research team confirms in Science this week that Mars’ dunes are not static. Atmospheric processes forged by the turning of Mars‘ seasons cut into the dunes and send sand flying about. Scientists just couldn’t see it before.

“I was hoping for tiny little changes to be detectable,” planetary scientist Candice Hansen-Koharcheck with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., [said]. “This was more like knock-your-socks-off kind of stuff. It’s a very active part of the Mars landscape in today’s climate.” [Discovery News]

Hansen-Koharcheck turned the HiRISE camera of the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on the dunes, and recorded for two Martian years (four Earth years or so). Earlier HiRISE pictures suggested that the dunes were not unchanging. These new images show not only that the dunes of Mars are a dynamic place, but, according to the team, that the forces pushing their evolution are not seen on our planet.

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For months we here at DISCOVER have been waiting impatiently for the Kepler mission to open up its vault of new exoplanets, hopefully filled with a bevy of Earth-like worlds and other exotic planets. Today planet lovers got a new peek at the Kepler findings, and those findings are stunning.

First, the Kepler scientists announced more than 1,200 candidate planets, which got DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait excited:

This is incredible! Even though I was expecting a number like this, actually hearing it for real is stunning. In 15 years we’ve found about 500 planets orbiting other stars, but in the almost two years since Kepler launched it may have easily tripled that number! Now, to be careful: these are candidate planets, which means they have not been confirmed. But in most cases these look pretty good, and if these numbers hold up it indicates that our galaxy is lousy with planets. They’re everywhere.

While those 1,200 are candidates, astronomers have confirmed a peculiar and fascinating set of six. From Phil Plait:

Using NASA’s orbiting Kepler observatory, astronomers have found a complete solar system of six planets orbiting a sun-like star… and it’s really weird: five of the six planets huddle closer to their star than Mercury does to the Sun!

None of them is what I would call precisely earth-like — they’re all more massive and much hotter than Earth — but their properties are intriguing, and promise that more wonderful discoveries from Kepler are coming.

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ESO/L. Calçada

Its’ time for another mind-blowing, record-breaking discovery by the Hubble Space Telescope. This time, it’s creeping closer than ever toward the beginning of the universe.

From Phil Plait:

Astronomers have just announced they have discovered what may be the most distant galaxy ever seen, smashing the previous record holder. This galaxy is at a mind-crushing distance of 13.2 billion light years from Earth, making it not just the most distant galaxy but also the most distant extant object ever detected!

…

Named UDFj-39546284, the galaxy is seen as it was just 480 million years after the Universe itself formed! The previous record holder — which was announced just last October — was 13.1 billion light years away. This new galaxy beats that by 120 million light years, a substantial amount. Mind you, these galaxies formed not long after the Big Bang, which happened 13.73 billion years ago. We think the very first galaxies started forming 200 – 300 million years after the Bang; if that’s correct then we won’t see any galaxies more than about 13.5 billion light years away. Going from 13.1 to 13.2 billion light years represents a big jump closer to that ultimate limit!

For plenty more about this, check out the rest of Phil’s post at Bad Astronomy.

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Image: NASA, ESA

At least now we know what the title of President Obama‘s self-help book will be: “Winning the future.”

Last night, in the third State of the Union Address of Obama’s presidency, he began by extolling the need for the country to compete with other rising nations for the jobs of the future (and using some version of his new catchphrase multiple times). The President hit many notes that have science and technology advocates smiling this morning, including his call to turn around yesterday’s sobering statistics about the lack of science proficiency of American students.

The world has changed, Obama told Congress, and the US will only retain its competitive edge over nations like China and India if it invests in a skilled workforce and cutting-edge science and technology: “We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” [New Scientist]

Obama went on to urge parents to get their kids’ priorities straight, and uttered the line that may have tickled science geeks the most:

We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair.

The President also called for more funding for biomedical, renewable energy, and other research to launch a wave of innovation. Obama deemed this our “Sputnik moment,” comparing it to the moment in the late 1950s when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite and the U.S. raced to catch up to and then surpass Soviet space science.

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Good news, solar sail enthusiasts: the NASA experimental spacecraft that was feared to be a dud sprang into life last week.

NanoSail-D was launched aboard a small satellite in December; once the satellite was in orbit the engineers back on Earth ordered the cargo door opened, and waited for NanoSail-D to pop out as planned. But the solar sail craft remained stubbornly inside the cargo bay. As weeks passed with no action, NASA’s hopes for the craft sunk.

But last Wednesday, NASA announced that NanoSail-D had spontaneously emerged.

“We knew that the door opened and it was possible that NanoSail-D could eject on its own,” Mark Boudreaux, FASTSAT project manager at the Marshall Center, said in a press release. “What a pleasant surprise this morning when our flight operations team confirmed that NanoSail-D is now a free flyer.” [CNN]

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This NASA probe had its Valentine’s Day plans set well in advance. On February 14 at 11:37 p.m. eastern time, the Stardust-NExT spacecraft will swoop past the comet Tempel 1 to snap photos and collect data about this solar system wanderer. The probe will pass just 124 miles from Tempel 1.

Tempel 1 is of particular interest because another probe has dallied with it in the past: In 2005, NASA’s Deep Impact probe approached and fired an 800-pound impactor at the comet’s surface to study its composition. While that mission was a success, the dust kicked up from the crash prevented the Deep Impact probe from getting a good look at the crater created. By sending Stardust-NExT along now, researchers can finally get a good look at the crater.

And that’s not all they’ll be looking at.

Since the 2005 impact, the comet has passed closer to the sun and then headed out to the orbit of Jupiter, before heading back for another visit to the inner solar system. The team hopes to see not only the size of the crater plowed by the 2005 impact, but also to see how a close pass by the sun resurfaces a comet. “We’re going to find out a lot about how comets evolve,” says Stardust-NExT co-investigator Steve Chesley. [USA Today]

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Sometimes, distractions can be useful in themselves. That’s the message this week from the Planck space telescope, which has a mighty big mission: to take baby pictures of the universe. While it hasn’t yet accomplished that task, the preliminary disturbances that Planck scientists are now dealing with are yielding cosmic insights of their own.

Orbiting the Sun roughly 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, the Planck space-based telescope is scanning the sky for ultra-cold objects. Its instruments are chilled to just a tenth of a degree above absolute zero and are designed to pick up the faint microwave afterglow from the Big Bang, which scientists hope can tell them about the earliest moments of the Universe. [Nature News]

Planck was launched in spring of 2009 by the European Space Agency, and it’s still gathering data to complete its chart of this cosmic microwave background (CMB); researchers hope the map will shed light on the young universe’s brief “inflationary” period when it expanded extremely rapidly. At the moment, however, Planck is busy detecting other sources of microwaves so that it can subtract this “foreground” radiation from its map of the background.

So what are some of these sources?

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More than a trillion pixels from a million-plus images, combined to create the most detailed map of the universe ever created—one that would require a wall of a half-million HDTVs to properly appreciate. Not bad for something that looks a little like tan carpeting.

What you’re seeing is about one-third of the sky, imaged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has been assembling images from Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico for more than a dozen years to image the cosmos in unprecedented detail.

It replaces an image that is now over half a century old, created on photographic plates by the Palomar Sky Survey in the 1950s but still used by astronomers today. It contains 10 times as many objects – such as galaxies, stars and nebulae – as the Palomar survey and scientists hope it will be used for decades to come by astronomers hunting for everything from dark matter to planets orbiting other stars. [The Guardian]

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One of these things is not like the other: Astronomers have spotted a dwarf galaxy that spans just 3,000 light years across (as opposed to our Milky Way’s diameter of 100,000 light years), but hosts an outsize supermassive black hole for its puny size.

From DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait:

Some smaller galaxies have supermassive black holes as well, but in general these dwarf galaxies have some structure to them, with a well-defined core. Henize 2-10, as you can see, it a mess! It doesn’t have much overall structure, which is why it’s classified as an irregular galaxy. The thinking for big galaxies is that the black hole forms at the same time as the galaxy itself, and to regulate the growth of each other. When you look at lots of big galaxies, there’s a pretty clear overall correlation between the mass of the black hole and the galaxy around it.

So it’s pretty weird that Henize 2-10 has a supermassive black hole at all, but it turns out the hole is also about a million times the mass of the Sun — that’s pretty freakin’ big for such a tiny galaxy! That’s 1/4 the mass of our own black hole, in a galaxy that itself is far smaller than ours.

For more details about this weird galaxy, check out the rest of this post at Bad Astronomy. And for more galaxy-black hole weirdness, read last week’s 80beats post about whether mergers of galaxies truly cause supermassive black holes to become hyperactive.

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Image: Reines, et al., NRAO/AUI/NSF, NASA