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.

Related Content:
80beats: Astronomers Predict a Bonanza of Earth-Sized Exoplanets
80beats: How Excited Should We Be About the New “Goldilocks” Exoplanet?
80beats: Astronomers Find a Bevy of Exoplanets; Won’t Discuss Most Interesting Ones
DISCOVER: How Long Until We Find a Second Earth?

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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Bad Astronomy: How Deep Is the Universe?
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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.

Related Content:
80beats: Study: Hyperactive Black Holes Aren’t Caused by Galactic Smash-ups
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80beats: Researchers Spot an Ancient Starburst from the Universe’s Dark Ages

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

You know the old routine in sci-fi: Aliens show up, people of Earth freak out. Whether we provoke  aliens a la The Day the Earth Stood Still or they arrive foaming with blood lust like in Mars Attacks, storytellers’ general feeling is that the mass of humanity would not respond well to the real presence of extraterrestrial life. We need Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones to keep ‘em separated from us.

In 2011—the year after we were supposed to make contact—are we humans still a backwater mob of talking apes who would crumble into pandemonium, or cosmic self-doubt, at the discovery of life beyond Earth? This week, a special issue of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society addresses that question and more.

You’ve come a long way, baby

Albert Harrison, psychologist at the University of California, Davis, may live to regret saying nice things about humanity. But it’s nice to see somebody giving us a vote of confidence:

The Brookings Report warned in 1961 that the discovery of life beyond Earth could lead to social upheaval. But [Harrison] says “times have changed dramatically” since then. Even the discovery of intelligent aliens “may be far less startling for generations that have been brought up with word processors, electronic calculators, avatars and cell phones as compared with earlier generations used to typewriters, slide rules, pay phones and rag dolls,” Harrison writes in one of the papers. [MSNBC]

SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) hasn’t been successful in its half-century hunt for alien civilizations, but it has ingrained into people the idea of looking for life beyond Earth. The continually increasing exoplanet count (one discovery was announced just today) is showing people just a small glimpse of the variety of worlds out there. Thus, Harrison says the people of Earth would respond to the discovery of alien life with “delight or indifference,” according to the Press Association.

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The Kepler space telescope, launched nearly two years ago, has already proven its worth as an exoplanet hunter many times over. But the discoveries keep on coming. NASA just announced that Kepler has found its first rocky planet–and that the rocky world is only 1.4 times the size of Earth, making it the smallest exoplanet ever found.

Phil Plait explains that this nearly Earth-sized isn’t actually Earth-like and habitable:

[I]t orbits extremely close in to its star, circling over the star’s surface at a distance of roughly 3 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) — amazingly, it takes less than an Earth day to make one circuit. But being that close to a star comes at a price: the surface temperature of the planet must be several thousand degrees!

The planet, Kepler-10b, may not be habitable to life as we know it, but Plait is still plenty excited. Get the rest of the story on how the planet was found and what its discovery means over at Bad Astronomy.

Related Content:
80beats: Astronomers Predict a Bonanza of Earth-Sized Exoplanets
80beats: How Excited Should We Be About the New “Goldilocks” Exoplanet?
80beats: Astronomers Find a Bevy of Exoplanets; Won’t Discuss Most Interesting Ones
80beats: After a Flawless Launch, Kepler Telescope Gets Ready for Planet Hunting
DISCOVER: How Long Until We Find a Second Earth?

The answers to what might be found deep inside the moon have themselves been found deep inside data that’s been collecting dust for more than 30 years.

When Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in 1969, they did more than make history and utter unforgettable words. They also deployed seismic sensors that would allow scientists back on Earth to monitor the activity on the moon. Crews from the 12th, 14th, 15th, and 16th iterations of Apollo also deployed sensors, the lot of which took measurements until 1977. Using recently developed techniques of analysis, two teams working independently say they have gone back into that catalog of data and sorted through the statistical noise that has confounded researchers, creating a clear picture of the moon’s core.

The new study provides the first confirmation of layering of the moon’s core and suggests that the moon, like Earth, has a solid inner core surrounded by a molten outer core, researchers said. But the moon’s interior also has another layer of partially melted material – a ring of magma – around its outer core, the study found. [MSNBC]

The moon shakes with moonquakes, but those are more scattered and weaker than the quakes we experience here on the home world, and the moon’s busted-up surface made the signals difficult for Apollo seismic monitors to read. Through a statistical technique called waveform stacking, the new teams could better identify how seismic waves move through the moon, and especially how the core affects them. That, in turn, shows the size and density of the core.

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At the heart of most galaxies lies a supermassive black hole. And in some galaxies, the black hole is bigger and badder than usual. These raging overachievers, called active galactic nuclei, can be some of the brightest objects in space, sweeping up a huge amount of material from their local areas and emitting enough energy to outshine the galaxies around them. The question is, where do they get all the stuff to swallow? Not where scientists had expected, according to a new study.

An obvious answer—and the one that for years has seemed likeliest—is that these hyperactive black holes arise from the merger of galaxies. All the gas that comes together during a two-galaxy crash could feed a supermassive black hole, turning it from docile to brilliant. But there’s a problem.

“It’s totally intuitive,” said astrophysicist Knud Jahnke of the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, a coauthor of the new study. “But it was a gut-feeling idea. In court you would say there was some circumstantial evidence for it, but no proof.” Earlier studies looked only at galaxies with the brightest active nuclei, which could have biased their results, Jahnke said. They also didn’t compare active galaxies to those with quiet black holes. [Wired]

For a study coming out in the Astrophysical Journal, Jahnke and others tried to put the galaxy merger hypotheses through a true controlled test, and they found no solid evidence to back it up.

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