Download ginormous versions of the image at the link. [Spacetelescope.org via Wired]

The Titan Saturn System Mission, a joint endeavor between NASA and the European Space Agency, hopes to launch probes to Titan by 2020 with the aim of better understanding the seas, atmosphere, surface composition and subterranean dynamics of Saturn's largest moon. One of the probes would be a seagoing vessel, designed to sail on Titan's hydrocarbon lakes. Since the surface of Titan is so wildly varied, though, TSSM is also planning to set a hot-air balloon drifting for six months at an altitude of 10 kilometers, recording as it goes.

Proposals for sending a balloon to Titan have existed for a few years now. NASA reports use the term "montgolfiere" to describe the craft, a reference to the hot-air balloon design pioneered by the Montgolfier brothers in 1873. Like these nineteenth-century airships, Titan's balloon would achieve loft by capturing heated gas in a bulbous overhead bag, called an envelope. While the first hot-air balloons kept live fires burning in their gondolas, the heat for Titan's balloon would be generated by an onboard plutonium isotope.

"Hot-air" is a relative term in this case. Titan's mean surface temperature is about -290 Fahrenheit, so a balloon flying over Titan would require only about 1 percent of the heat it would need on Earth. This is one reason a ballooning mission makes sense, though there are others: Titan's slow rotation produces generally calm weather, and a system of trade winds would carry a drifting aircraft all the way around the moon. Just in case the wind doesn't do the trick, the team at TSSM is considering a mechanical propeller to help guide the balloon.

Titan features some of the most diverse terrain to be found anywhere in the solar system. Aside from the massive lakes (the only stable bodies of surface liquid in our system besides Earth's own), Titan also sports deserts, craters, cryovolcanoes and mountains of water ice. A terrestrial rover would be impractical on a world with such eclectic geology. It's hoped that not only could a balloon cover more ground than a wheeled vehicle, but it might even be able to land and scoop a bit of surface material for study.

Most current projections don't put the balloon or the boat on Titan sooner than 2029. An overview of the Titan Saturn System Mission's plans and goals is available online.

Since a manned mission to Mars would, using current technology, take roughly 520 days, both NASA and the ESA have planned simulated missions to test their astronauts' ability to live in tight quarters for extended periods of time. Six NASA astronauts recently completed a 105-day mock mission, and a 520-day simulation is in the works. The ESA, in a joint effort with the Russian Academy of Science's Institute for Medical-Biological Problems, is also planning a 100-day lock-in, offering astronauts who survive the experience a reality show-eque incentive of $20,000 each.

Luke McKinney of the Daily Galaxy thinks the ESA has missed a valuable opportunity to increase interest in the space program by treating its astronauts like island castaways:

With all the recent work by space agencies to raise their profile in the public eye, especially in a world with people asking "Why should we spend money on this when nobody has any?" You literally don't need to add anything - the experiment will be full of cameras anyway, you've got volunteers from three different countries (Russian, Germany and France), you just need to connect it to the TV and it'll start making money. Also, elimination rounds and "voting people off" is a lot more interesting with spaceships and airlocks.

It's a cute idea, but the biggest obstacle the NASA astronauts faced in their 105 days of isolation wasn't back-biting, strategizing, or romantic entanglements — it was boredom. And the sorts of antics that fuel reality television aren't exactly conducive to a successful space mission. Still, perhaps this is the golden opportunity for some enterprising reality TV exec: finding a way to break up the monotony of space travel without sabotaging the mission, and somehow keeping audiences coming back week after week.

Manned Mission-to-Mars Simulation: The Ultimate Reality TV Show [Daily Galaxy]

The two solar missions were discussed at a conference of solar physicists in Bournemouth this past weekend. One mission, spearheaded by the European Space Agency, will launch in 2017. Protected by a 15-inch heat shield, the solar orbiter will take pictures of the sun's poles and its surface, orbiting at a distance of 20 million miles - a third closer than Mercury. Its orbit will take it past the sun's poles. Here are some cool pics of the solar orbiter:

And then meanwhile NASA is launching a probe with the sexy, sexy name of Solar Probe Plus. Forget orbiting the sun - this baby will fly into the sun's upper atmosphere, known as the corona, and fly just 4.3 million miles above the surface. That's getting up close and personal! [Daily Telegraph]

The ESA has posted the footage of the Automated Transfer Vehicle's last ride here; until I saw it, I never thought burning garbage could look so transcendent. But this isn't just for decoration: the ESA announced that its engineers will be analyzing Jules Verne's fiery final path.

Following its undocking on 5 September, the ATV had spent 23 days carrying out “rephasing” manoeuvres to bring it to the correct position behind and underneath the ISS. This predefined position allowed the re-entry to be viewed and recorded from the Station itself, as well as from two specially-equipped observation planes located in the vicinity of the ATV’s flight path in the skies above the South Pacific. This observation campaign will serve to determine whether the vehicle’s break-up matched the computer modelling.

This news comes at a troubling time for NASA. At a press conference on Monday, program administrators announced a second delay for the Space Shuttle Atlantis's mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Originally scheduled for October 10, the servicing mission will now take place sometime in 2009. What needs to be fixed is the Science Instrument Control and Data Handling Unit, which is the box of fun you see below.

While NASA deals with its issues, you'll have to look to the ESA for your space porn. Good thing they're already building the next ATV!

Images from ESA and NASA.

More info at these links: [ESA and ESAand ESA ]

Last week, we told you about two galactic clusters colliding, providing visual (and x-ray) evidence of the existence of dark matter. Dark energy is even more elusive, but astronomers who were looking at an entirely different cosmic object may have stumbled across a major clue.

The large blue glow in the image (taken with the Large Binocular Telescope at the Mt. Graham International Observatory to confirm XMM-Newton's discovery) is a galactic cluster with the catchy name 2XMM J083026+524133. It's heavier than any other cluster, and it's farther from Earth than any other as well. In fact, it's twice as far as the next farthest. Here's the mystery — really distant clusters should be very young, because it takes their light so long to reach us. Young clusters shouldn't be big, because it takes time for all those galaxies to pull together. A huge, distant cluster is seemingly impossible. That's where dark energy comes in.

Dark energy, to put it into very simple terms, is a sort of anti-gravity force that actually pushes space apart and speeds the expansion of the universe. If it exists, that is. It is one possible explanation for 2XMM J083026+524133's distance. It might be an old cluster that appears more distant than it should be due to dark energy fueled expansion of space. What is the source of all the dark energy in the universe? Tony Iommi. Image by: ESA.

Cosmic Heavyweight. [Science News]

The image above is a composite, combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope with x-ray imagery from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Hubble captured the blue areas by detecting the gravitational lensing of light shining around the cluster. Dark matter in the cluster is causing the lensing. The pink area is a mass of hot gas, made of ordinary matter, which radiates the x-rays detected by Chandra.

What's amazing about the image is how clearly it shows that the dark matter separated from the ordinary matter when the clusters collided. The gases interacted with each other gravitationally, causing them to slow down and "pile up" in the middle of the clusters. The dark matter evidently did not interact with itself, sliding to the outer edges of the clusters. Astronomers think the mass of all this dark matter is what holds clusters together - without it, the galaxies are moving too fast to stay together. The cluster collision provides a lot of direct evidence that dark matter exists. Image by: NASA/ESA.

You can see the full image in high-resolution here.

Collision of galaxy clusters captured by astronomers. [EurkeAlert!]

The Mars Express photos have a resolution of less than four meters per pixel, and they cover the entire surface of Phobos. This gives scientists an unprecedented look at the spudlike satellite. Next year, a Russian mission with the awesome name "Phobos-Grunt" will land there and take soil samples before returning to Earth.
I actually didn't have a pair of 3D glasses handy, so hopefully this looks as cool as I'm hoping it does. Is Phobos hurtling out of your screen at you while a cheesy Aerosmith song plays in the background? Check out the full-size (i.e., truly enormous) images here. Images by: ESA.

Mars Express Acquires Sharpest Images Of Martian Moon Phobos. [Science Daily]

According to the European Space Agency:

[This is] an image taken by the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express of Echus Chasma, one of the largest water source regions on the Red Planet. Echus Chasma, which resembles Arizona's Grand Canyon, is an approximately 62.1 miles (100 km) long and 6.2 miles (10 km) wide. The data was acquired on 25 September 2005. A 4000-meter-high cliff marks the edge of the source area of Kasei Valles in its western part. Gigantic water falls may have once plunged over these cliffs on to the valley floor. The original shoreline is still partially visible. The remarkably smooth valley floor was later flooded by basaltic lava.

Photos via AP.

Echus Chasma Images from Mars Express [via People's Daily Online]

ESA scientists are currently testing intermetallic materials, combinations of metal similar to alloys in which two or more metals are diffused together on a molecular level. Titanium aluminide is an intermetal that could cut the weight of fan blades in jet engines by half. Unfortunately, titanium aluminide tends to fail under high temperatures. This can be solved by introducing small amounts of other materials, such as niobium. In Earth gravity, weight differences between the different metals makes it difficult to get them to diffuse properly.

Small-scale tests in rockets have shown that zero-g solves many of the issues with intermetallic production. The ESA will run larger tests over longer periods of time in the new Columbus science module on the ISS. These space metals could revolutionize the aerospace industry. Photo by: NASA.

'Space metals' aid perfection quest. [BBC]

Scientists with the European Space Agency experimented with marigolds grown in crushed anorthosite, an Earth-rock that is a close analogue to the lunar surface. Just potting the flowers in anorthosite was not effective. They didn't grow. But adding certain bacteria made a huge difference. The marigolds didn't exactly flourish in the faux moondirt, but they did grow and even blossomed. The bacteria facilitated the transfer of nutrients from the anorthosite to the plants.

Of course, the area where the plants were grown would need to be domed (they still need air) and watered, but they could be part of a water filtration system or even provide food for a self-sustaining lunar colony. While the ESA has no actual plans to go to the moon anytime soon, some scientists think we could send a robot to plant lunar veggies before the first colonists arrive. Photo by: BBC.

Plants 'thrive' on Moon rock diet [BBC]

Because of the immense atmospheric pressure on Venus (more than 90 times higher than sea level Earth air pressure), it's unlikely that a volcano there would erupt explosively. However, it could emit sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere as liquid lava flows down the volcano's flank. The Venus Express looks at the sun through Venus' atmosphere, then uses spectroscopy to identify the chemicals there. It observed a more than 60 percent drop in sulfur dioxide levels over just a few days, strong evidence of an intermittent source of that gas. ESA scientists want to use more spectroscopy to spot a tell-tale gas plume, or infrared sensors to find volcanic hot spots. Photo by NASA.

Search For Active Volcanoes On Venus In High Gear. [Science Daily]

The ESA's ATV is fully automated. When it gets close to the ISS, the entire docking procedure is handled by computers using GPS, optical sensors and an off-board laser range-finder. Once it is docked, astronauts can enter the cargo bay directly from the main ISS modules and retrieve supplies without ever putting on a space suit. It will remain docked for several months, during which time it will be emptied of supplies and then gradually filled with waste and garbage (liquid and solid).

When it's time for another cargo vehicle to dock with the ISS, the Jules Verne will undock and head into a steep re-entry over the Pacific Ocean, burning up when it hits the atmosphere. The ESA has plans for another six expendable cargo vehicles - it would be cool if they named them all after classic sci-fi authors. The Jules Verne carried two rare manuscripts by the groundbreaking writer, which will be kept on the ISS. Photo by: ESA.

Impressive dress-rehearsal for Jules Verne ATV. [ESA]

Image of the Venus Express from the European Space Agency. [MSNBC]