Scientists have long thought that the Earth wasn't formed with a lot of organic matter, due to the planet's proximity to the sun, but were unsure where we got the necessary chemical compounds for life to thrive on the planet. Now scientists believe that the answers may lie on meteors and comets passing through Earth's atmosphere.

New Scientist reports on experiments carried out by Peter Schultz of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and Seiji Sugita of the University of Tokyo, Japan, which suggest that, although organic compounds on the objects would get burned up on atmospheric entry, that's not the end of the story. Schultz:

The idea in the past has been, 'Any of this stuff coming through the atmosphere would be heated to the point where it would get wasted... What this new work did was to show that we might actually revive these compounds.

What Schultz and Sugita believe is that the flashes resulting from objects burning up on entry produces cyanide, which they believe could have reacted with the Earth's already existant compounds to form more complex, carbon-containing molecules that would ultimately prove essential to Earth-based life. It's not as dramatic as cylons and humans landing on our planet, but it's a possible answer to a long-standing question... and an appropriately cosmic origin for life on the planet.

Was life founded on cyanide from space crashes? [New Scientist]

According to NASA, whose researchers first wrote about this lingering smog bank on Oct. 30:

A temperature inversion may be responsible for the build up of pollution over eastern China. Normally, air cools with altitude, but occasionally, a layer of cool air will be trapped beneath a layer of warm air. Since the cool air is more dense than the air above it, the two layers don't mix and pollutants build up in the cool air near Earth's surface.

Temperature inversions develop most often during the winter, when long, cool nights chill the ground. The cold land cools the air nearest the ground, leaving the air at higher altitudes warmer. The two layers of air do not easily mix, and the temperature inversion can last for days if winds are calm.

So far it has lasted for more than a week. Is this the future of weather?

via NASA

Barcelona-based Galactic Suite Ltd is currently building a small, orbiting hotel, which they claim will be open for business in 2012 (a timeline many people doubt). The initial hotel will be a single pod that can house four guests and two astronaut pilots, and will orbit 450 km above the Earth. The current pricetag is three million euros for a three-day stay, but that includes more than transit and a place to rest your weightless head. Guests will also spend eight weeks on a tropical island training for their vacation missions.

Once aboard the pod, guests will travel around the world once every 80 minutes and watch the sun rise and set 15 times a day. And, if they get sick of floating around the pod, guests will be wearing Velcro suits that will allow them to crawl along the walls.

So who is funding all this extraterrestrial fun? It sounds vaguely supervillainous, but Galactic Suite would only say that an anonymous billionaire had funded the project to the tune of $3 billion.

Space hotel says it's on schedule to open in 2012 [Yahoo! News via Reddit]

An earlier version of this panoramic image was an Astronomy Picture Of The Day in 2001, but the Panorama 2.0 is much, much more detailed, and Mellinger has eliminated some distortions and other problems in the original image.

According to a press release from the University of Chicago Press:

Piecing together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the forthcoming issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. An interactive version of the picture can viewed on Mellinger's website.

"This panorama image shows stars 1000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae," Mellinger said. Its high resolution makes the panorama useful for both educational and scientific purposes, he says.

Mellinger spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to take digital photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. After the photographs were taken, "the real work started," Mellinger said.

Simply cutting and pasting the images together into one big picture would not work. Each photograph is a two-dimensional projection of the celestial sphere. As such, each one contains distortions, in much the same way that flat maps of the round Earth are distorted. In order for the images to fit together seamlessly, those distortions had to be accounted for. To do that, Mellinger used a mathematical model-and hundreds of hours in front of a computer.

Another problem Mellinger had to deal with was the differing background light in each photograph.

"Due to artificial light pollution, natural air glow, as well as sunlight scattered by dust in our solar system, it is virtually impossible to take a wide-field astronomical photograph that has a perfectly uniform background," Mellinger said.

To fix this, Mellinger used data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The data allowed him to distinguish star light from unwanted background light. He could then edit out the varying background light in each photograph. That way they would fit together without looking patchy.

The result is an image of our home galaxy that no star-gazer could ever see from a single spot on earth. Mellinger plans to make the giant 648 megapixel image available to planetariums around the world.

[University of Chicago via Axel Mellinger via Examiner]

This is by no means comprehensive (there are more space monster movies, not mention many of the companions on Doctor Who were real screamers), and it's not all horror, but we have a nice sampling of folks screaming aboard spaceships, on alien worlds, and in the cold of space.

I love this news report about the K.C. Space Pirates, and "Maryann," their climbing robot, which uses solar panels, and energy beamed from the ground via a laser beam shot through a special telescope, to climb half a mile up, on a cord attached to a helicopter hovering overhead. The D.I.Y. enthusiasm among these part-time innovators is breathtaking, and you gotta love an inventor who says things like:

So we'll be beaming more energy to our robot in this competition than has ever been beamed to a remote moving device ever. We'll be setting a variety of world records as we proceed in this competition.

This $2 million prize is for wireless power transmission, the second half of the Space Elevator Games — the first half being a "Tether Challenge" to create a material strong enough to carry materials into space.

Here's the somewhat cheesy news report on the Space Pirates and their quest for the $2 million space "booty":

Space Elevator image above by FlyingSinger on Flickr. [Fox4KC.com]

Stross' blog entry, which really must be read in its entirety, runs through a thought experiment: suppose you dispatch a robot probe with mindless human-like "meat machines" to Earth, to see if humans could survive. Most of the planet's surface will kill those meat-machines instantly, because it's covered with ocean or too hot or too cold. Only about 15 percent of the surface won't kill them right away. But also, points out Stross, if the probe arrives too early or too late in Earth's history, it'll find a planet with an atmosphere and water content vastly different to its current make-up — we couldn't even breathe the air for the vast majority of the planet's history.

Concludes Stross:

So here's the upshot: of the 4.6 Gy of Earth's known history, there's only been enough oxygen in the atmosphere for us to survive for about 0.5 Gy. For roughly 90% of the Earth's history we couldn't even breathe the air. And about 10-25% of the time, there have been ice ages so savagely fierce that the glaciers reached the tropics: odds are good that any meat probe landing on solid ground during these periods would rapidly die of exposure. So historically, Earth has only been inhabitable about 8% of the time - assuming you are lucky enough to find some solid ground. Once you factor in the random surface distribution, we're down to about 2% survivability.

And the future is likely just as dire — so what are the chances of finding another planet that matches the minority of our own planet's surface, with the exact same atmosphere as our own brief era? [Charlie's Diary]

Observers of the Moon's surface have seen "sinuous rilles," or long, winding depressions on its surface that suggest the presence of underground tunnels. Such tunnels would be formed when lava rips through an underground area, then drains away, leaving a long tube behind. (Such structures exist on Earth, too.) At last, a satellite captured solid evidence for these tunnels when it snapped this picture of a massive hole in the Moon's surface.

The hole is actually what's called a "skylight," or a rift in the top of an ancient lava tunnel. According to New Scientist:

The team found the first candidate skylight in a volcanic area on the moon's near side called Marius Hills. "This is the first time that anybody's actually identified a skylight in a possible lava tube" on the moon, [researcher Carolyn] van der Bogert, who helped analyse the feature, told New Scientist.

The hole measures 65 metres across, and based on images taken at a variety of sun angles, the the hole is thought to extend down at least 80 metres. It sits in the middle of a rille, suggesting the hole leads into a lava tube as wide as 370 metres across.

It is not clear exactly how the hole formed. A meteorite impact, moonquakes, or pressure created by gravitational tugs from the Earth could be to blame. Alternatively, part of the lava tube's ceiling could have been pulled off as lava in the tube drained away billions of years ago.

We may not be able to explore this tube any time soon, however. Like lava tubes on Earth, it's possible that this tunnel is filled with debris and would require excavation to unblock.

What's important, however, is that we now have solid evidence that lava tubes exist beneath the Moon's surface, which means Moon real estate just got a little more appealing. Unless, of course, Moon natives already live there.

via New Scientist

(Thanks, Kle!)

The Mars-500 pseudomission will take place next year at the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. The 520 days is meant to copy the length of an actual Mars mission, including the journey to and from the planet and a 30-day stay on the surface. The ESA is currently seeking six volunteers (English and Russian speakers ages 20-50 in good health with specific science backgrounds) to simulate the less fun parts of being an astronaut. Before you send in your application, New Scientist points out some possible downsides:

Boredom: The major complaint from participants in this year's 105-day mission of isolation was severe boredom. Maybe the ESA could let you take a Kindle on board, or you and your fellow fake astronauts could play a long-running RPG. But be prepared to go pretty stir-crazy.

Hating Your Podmates: In 1982 two Soyuz cosmonauts, Valentin Vitalyevich Lebedev and Anatoli Berezovoi, hated each other so much that they spent their 211-day mission in almost complete silence. 520 days is more than enough time to start hating the way someone else mouth breathes or chews their food.

Sexual Harassment: During a simulated space station mission in 2000, a Russian man tried to forcibly kiss one of the women on board. Eventually, the Russian "cosmonauts" had to be separated from the rest of the crew.

Not Actually Accomplishing Anything: Peter Suedfeld of the University of British Columbia wrote a study that suggests these faux missions aren't ideal for simulating actual mission conditions. He suggests that it would be better to study exploratory missions on Earth, such as research expeditions in Antarctica.

What's the point of a fake 500-day Mars mission? [New Scientist]

I first spotted this chart on Laughing Squid, and it was created for IEEE's special issue on traveling to Mars.

See more brilliant and weird concept design at Bryan Christie.

These posters come from Visual Aid and Visual Aid 2, and are available as posters from the Visual Aid shop. Incidentally, they also have useful posters if you want to know how to make a balloon animal, how to play Cat's Cradle, or the different processes for mummification.

[Visual Aid via Core77]

According to The Register, this is the tallest rocket NASA has built in three decades, and it has 700 sensors on board to understand how a rocket this tall can fly. Photos by AP/John Raoux.

The image was captured by the LCROSS shepherding spacecraft, which was closely following the rocket when it hit the moon. According to LCROSS principal investigator Anthony Colaprete, it was this closeness that allowed them to capture the image at all:

The ejecta had to only come out and get into the sunlight a little more than a kilometre [high] for us to see it. It only had to rise half as high [as it would have for it to be visible to Earth-based viewers]... I think we are the only ones that have images.

Sounds a little suspicious to us, but maybe we're just cynical. According to Colaprete, analysis of the image and other data from the impact will be available mid-November.

Elusive lunar plume caught on camera after all [New Scientist]

The art of space exploration[Guardian.co.uk]

Scientists are using IBEX to create a more accurate map of the boundary between interstellar space and our heliosphere - the bubble of space created by solar winds from our sun. This bubble shields the planets from cosmic particles that zoom from interstellar space towards the sun at speeds ranging from 100,000 mph to more than 2.4 million mph. What scientists thought they'd find was a boundary between the heliosphere and interstellar space that was fairly regular and shifted gradually from one region to the other. But instead they discovered that the charged particles streaming out of our sun are a distinctive ribbon shape (the blue and red regions in the heliosphere model above), almost like an intense jet stream moving rapidly through the solar system.

Said Dr. David J. McComas, IBEX principal investigator:

The IBEX results are truly remarkable, with emissions not resembling any of the current theories or models of this never-before-seen region. We expected to see small, gradual spatial variations at the interstellar boundary, some ten billion miles away. However, IBEX is showing us a very narrow ribbon that is two to three times brighter than anything else in the sky.

This suggests that in some ways, space weather resembles Earth weather. Except instead of hot fronts and cold fronts, you have the magnetic fields of distant stars changing the shape of solar winds here at home.

Here's a closer look at the ribbon.

One question arose immediately when scientists made this discovery: Why didn't the Voyager spacecraft see this ribbon? It turns out that it flows directly between the two satellites' flight paths (see top image).

Eric Christian, the IBEX deputy mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said:

The Voyagers are providing ground truth, but they're missing the most exciting region. It's like having two weather stations that miss the big storm that runs between them.

Looks like we have a destination for the next generation of Voyager-style craft.

Even more exciting is that this solar wind ribbon appears to be highly concentrated in some areas, as if the magnetic fields of our interstellar neighborhood are creating eddies and whirlpools of charged particles. Researchers poring over the IBEX data say they need to spend much more time analyzing what they've found before they can make any definitive statements about what all of this means. But one thing they can say for sure. Our solar system's weather - and by extension our solar system itself - is far more affected by nearby stars than anyone realized before.

via Southwest Research Institute

In the plans drafted by geologist Ellen Stofan, with funding from NASA, a capsule would splash down in one of these northern lakes — probably Ligeia Mare or Kraken Mare — with a "Lake Lander," known as the Titan Mare Explorer (or TiME for short.) Because solar power is in short supply in Titan's atmosphere, which is full of methane rain and far from the Sun, TiME would use a new kind of nuclear power cell known as the Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG). The lander wouldn't need sails to zoom along, pushed by Titan's nitrogen winds, but it would have a crow's nest supporting a camera, to gain a better vantage point.

Titan's average temperatures of -292 Fahrenheit are enough to keep those methane/ethane/propane seas liquid. Stofan told Space.Com:

It's very cold, but the technological challenges aren't as big as you might think. Landing in liquid is a lot more forgiving than on land.

Now that Stofan has funding to draw up her plans, she is crafting a proposal for NASA to fund the mission under its Discovery program — and if that gets approved, our nuclear windjammer could explore Titan's seas as soon as 2022. Strohan's report (PDF) is here. [Space.com and The Register]

Things were a bit chaotic on the carpet last night but we managed to get a few moments with Hollywood's favorite everyman. Including how he got involved in Where The Wild Things Are, and hints about the Toy Story 3 storyline.

How did you get involved in this production?

I called up Maurice Sendack about 10 or 12 years ago, and said, "look you don't know me but I'm a big fan of your book, and if you ever want to make it into a movie, let us help you...

They shot this in Australia. And once they got going they were working on it full force. I was just saying, "What can we help do?" There's nothing more extraneous than a producer on set saying, "Hey, what time's lunch?" I didn't need to do that, Spike was in good hands.

Will you bring your kids to see this movie?

Yes, well, all my kids were all grown up.

Who are the new Toys in Toy Story 3?

There's a ton of them and I think I'm not allowed to say.

Not even one little toy?

I think contractually if I say anything, the legal team of the Walt Disney company will swoop down and grab up all your [recorders] [Hanks then jokingly grabs up all the reporters' recorders].

You're a space fan, what did you think about NASA blowing up the moon?

Oh, that was fantastic, I wish we could have actually seen it — what a brilliant idea. You smash in a thing and make it cloudy, and fly the space craft through it. Who was the genius that came up with that?

I apologize in advance for the weird racist statue with images # 2 and 3. Images by AFP/Getty.

A18th century Planetarium made by Martin Benjamin is exhibited on October 13, 2009 during the 'Astrum 2009, Astronomy and Instruments' exhibition at The Vatican museum. The exhibition, running from October 16 to January 16, 2010 is organized on occasion of the International year of Astronomy, with the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), and is orientated on the history, functioning and evolution of the different instruments created by Man over ten centuries for the observation of the sky, for the location of the stars and celestial bodies. AFP PHOTO / VINCENZO PINTO (Photo credit should read VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/Getty Images)

A view of a celestial and terrestrial Globe designed by Vincenzo Maria Coronelli in 1696 which is exhibited on October 13, 2009 during the 'Astrum 2009, Astronomy and Instruments' exhibition at The Vatican museum. The exhibition, running from October 16 to January 16, 2010 is organized on occasion of the International year of Astronomy, with the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), and is orientated on the history, functioning and evolution of the different instruments created by Man over ten centuries for the observation of the sky, for the location of the stars and celestial bodies. AFP PHOTO / VINCENZO PINTO (Photo credit should read VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/Getty Images)

A view of a celestial and terrestrial Globe designed by Vincenzo Maria Coronelli in 1696 which is exhibited on October 13, 2009 during the 'Astrum 2009, Astronomy and Instruments' exhibition at The Vatican museum. The exhibition, running from October 16 to January 16, 2010 is organized on occasion of the International year of Astronomy, with the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), and is orientated on the history, functioning and evolution of the different instruments created by Man over ten centuries for the observation of the sky, for the location of the stars and celestial bodies. AFP PHOTO / VINCENZO PINTO (Photo credit should read VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/Getty Images)

A celestial globe by Giovanni Antonio Vanosino in1567, showing the main Ptolemaic constellations in convex representation, is exhibited on October 13, 2009 during the 'Astrum 2009' exhibition at The Vatican museum. The exhibition, running from October 16 to January 16, 2010 is organized on occasion of the International year of Astronomy, with the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), and is orientated on the history, functioning and evolution of the different instruments created by Man over ten centuries for the observation of the sky, for the location of the stars and celestial bodies. AFP PHOTO / VINCENZO PINTO (Photo credit should read VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/Getty Images)

A celestial globe by Giovanni Antonio Vanosino in1567, showing the main Ptolemaic constellations in convex representation, is exhibited on October 13, 2009 during the 'Astrum 2009' exhibition at The Vatican museum. The exhibition, running from October 16 to January 16, 2010 is organized on occasion of the International year of Astronomy, with the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), and is orientated on the history, functioning and evolution of the different instruments created by Man over ten centuries for the observation of the sky, for the location of the stars and celestial bodies. AFP PHOTO / VINCENZO PINTO (Photo credit should read VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/Getty Images)

The Arsenius Gualterus' astrolab is exhibited on October 13, 2009 during the 'Astrum 2009, Astronomy and Instruments' exhibition at The Vatican museum. The exhibition, running from October 16 to January 16, 2010 is organized on occasion of the International year of Astronomy, with the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), and is orientated on the history, functioning and evolution of the different instruments created by Man over ten centuries for the observation of the sky, for the location of the stars and celestial bodies. AFP PHOTO / VINCENZO PINTO (Photo credit should read VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/Getty Images)

The new initiative, which aims to reduce the cost of satellite launch tenfold to somewhere in the region of one million dollars, was announced at the International Astronautical Congress in Daejeon, South Korea. Requiring the creation of a low-cost launch system won't be cheap, warns Virgin Galactic president, Will Whitehorn:

This effort will involve designing, building and marketing a launcher rather than the satellites themselves... We hope to get satellite launches underway by 2013 or 2014.

Virgin Galactic adds satellite launches to space tourism [New Scientist]

We hadn't realized quite how many space zombies there are out there — especially if you throw in some edge cases like the Reavers. Zombies have been ruling the spaceways for decades, since Plan 9 From Outer Space and Astro Zombies (which is technically about a human space engineer who uses astronaut tech to turn Earthlings into zombies.)

Thanks to Ira Wile, Angela Cooper, Morgan Johnson, Austin Grossman, Greta Christina, Derek Powazek, Brent Cox, Alasdair Stuart, Kayobi, 92BuicLeSabre, and anyone else we missed!

Driq of Cliq, from Green Lantern.

Lately, Green Lantern is all about the space zombies, with the huge galaxy-spanning Blackest Night crossover event. Everyone who's ever died in DC Comics is being reincarnated as a "Black Lantern," wielding a super-powerful set of rings that Batman's skull coughed up. (Or something.) But really, my favorite space zombie from Green Lantern has to be Driq of Cliq, the lantern who dies at the hands of Sinestro — but his ring keeps him alive, and sort of sentient, indefinitely. He shambles through a ton of issues of the comic, before finally coming undone when Hal Jordan/Parallax deactivates all the power rings. Driq is like a space zombie super-mascot.

The Reavers from Firefly/Serenity

Okay, so they're not technically undead, but the Reavers are totally zombies in every way that matters. They're mindless shells of human beings who've lost their humanity and everything else except the lust to kill and destroy. Like the "Rage" virus survivors in 28 Days Later, the Reavers are pale, posthuman and terrifying. They haunt the spaceways, their vicious howling almost echoing through the void.

The Husks in Mass Effect

The geth, merciless alien artificial intelligences, have a secret weapon: they impale dead people on dragon's teeth, mechanical spikes which turn the corpses into Husks, zombie-like reanimated soldiers. The dead people's organs and insides are liquified and replaced by cybernetics.

The victims in Lifeforce

Note: We debated endlessly whether Lifeforce was about zombies or vampires — the three aliens discovered aboard the spaceship are definitely vampires, since they devour your life force. And it's based on a book called The Space Vampires. On the other hand, the vampires come to Earth and start renanimating loads of humans, who definitely seem more zombie-like.

The "death troopers" in Star Wars: Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber

We'll be reviewing this book in a few days, but here's one of the entrants for Del Rey's book trailer contest. The damaged prison barge Purge finds an Imperial Star Destroyer floating dead in space, and the Purge sends people over to scavenge for parts — but the Star Destroyer isn't empty after all. A new plague has turned some of its crew into the living dead, who roam in packs. Writes Schreiber: "They traveled together now, their swollen, disease-ravaged bodies pressing against one another, death as the final brotherhood... Their eyes never left his, and there was a slinking primitve slyness to their movement... Sartoris saw ropy strands of drool swinging from their mouths, human and nonhuman alike."

The Swarm in Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell.

Yet another set of zombies created by evil science, the Swarm is a bioweapon created by the distant human alliance — it turns you into a shambling, semi-telepathic zombie. And all of the zombies in the Swarm form a neural net, a hive mind that gets smarter the more people they bite.

Space Zombies

They're terrifying! They're relentless! They're Canadian! Triple Take Productions has crafted several black-and-white short films about zombies from space — including Space Zombies: Terror From The Sky!, in which alien zombies come to Earth to transplant cat brains into people. Or into themselves. Ummmm... it's not quite clear. There's definitely a cat brain transplant thing happening, in any case. I can think of several people who would be greatly improved by having cat brains transplanted into them.

Kai from Lexx

The last of the Brunnen-G, Kai is killed trying to save his people from the Divine Shadow — but instead of being destroyed, his corpse is reanimated as a Divine Assassin, who cannot be killed. And that's just one thing on the long list of stuff Kai cannot do, after being dead. Until finally, he wins his life back in a chess game. (Thanks, Disco Dave!)

The Necromorphs in Dead Space

Reanimated by some kind of unknown alien micro-organism, the Necromorphs are human corpses brought back to life, to attack and destroy the living. Any human who dies rapidly turns into a Necromorph, usually due to an Infector, which penetrates your skull with its sharp proboscis. Some Necromorphs are hideously mutated.

The Flood from Halo

These parasitic alien life forms create bodies for themselves out of the recently deceased, creating a quasi-zombie army that sprouts tentacles instead of human limbs or sensory arrays instead of heads. They alter the host organism's DNA by digesting, creating weird parodies of the human form.

The "Fifty Years of Exploration" map, created by Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco for National Geographic, outlines humanity's journeys into space, starting from the early failed mission to Mars and Venus to the current flight of New Horizons. A complete, but scaled-down version of the map is shown below, but you can see the giant, full-sized map here.

Fifty Years of Exploration [National Geographic via Stevey via Metafilter]

Laliberte, a billionaire and the 261st richest person alive, just touched down in Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz rocket, after spending several days aboard the ISS, wearing his trademark red clown nose. While in space, he presided over a 14-city concert event honoring Bono, with participation by former Vice President Al Gore — the event, billed as the first show hosted from space, was designed to raise awareness of clean water issues. (Could the positive environmental effect possibly offset the environmental impact of blasting a clown into space?)

Laliberte will be the last space tourist for a long time, because the Soyuz rockets will be overbooked once the U.S. space shuttle fleet goes out of commission. [AFP]

Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona will be presenting his findings on Europa today at American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. Europa's ability to support macrofauna — more complex organisms like animals — hinges on how much oxygen is contained in the suspected ocean beneath the moon's icy surface.

Greenberg believes that energetic particles from the sun are able to reach Europa's subterranean ocean despite that layer of ice. Because the surface of Europa is relatively impact-free, the ice is believed to be relatively new, about 50 million years. Based on this, Greenberg sets forth the idea that Europa is being constantly resurfaced, possibly with fresh materials, thanks to oxidizers at the planet's surface. He also estimates that, if there were, say, fish on Europa, and those fish used the same amount of oxygen as Earth fish, the moon's ocean has enough oxygen to support 6.6 billion pounds of such macrofauna.

Of course, just because Europa might be able to sustain life doesn't mean we'll find life there. But this does present the possibility that other bodies produce enough oxygen to support complex biological processes.

Europa, Jupiter's Moon, Could Support Complex Life [Discovery]

Only two bodies in the Asteroid Belt are bigger than 2 Pallas - the protoplanets 1 Ceres and 4 Vesta. And unlike a lot of other asteroids in the Belt, 2 Pallas has most likely remained unchanged since the rocky region between Mars and Jupiter first formed. Scientists speculate that 2 Pallas was originally made from "water-rich material," and that early in its history it was smashed by a massive impact that broke off a number of smaller asteroids that share 2 Pallas' rough orbit. So not only do we have a protoplanet on our hands, but it spawned a bunch of smaller asteroids too.

According to Science:

Researchers identified color variations and topography that may be linked to the asteroid's thermal evolution and to the formation of its orbital "family" – the population of asteroids that share the same orbital properties as 2 Pallas and are thought to be the fragments of a collision. In particular, a large impact crater could represent the source of the Pallas family.

Above, you can see an artist's interpretation of that impact.

Things are rough out in the Belt. But at least there's another protoplanet out there now, ready to be hollowed out and turned into a generation ship.

via Science

Actually there will be no bombs involved. The LCROSS, or "lunar impacting probe," will itself smash into the Moon's surface near a crater-shadowed region where scientists have predicted that ice would form. Though radar of the Moon's surface lately has suggested strongly that such icy liquids are abundant on the Moon, the evidence remains inconclusive. Which is why we have to do the smash test.

The LCROSS will hit the Cabeus A site marked in the image below at 11:30 AM GMT October 9 - on the near side of the Moon, so you'll be able to see the explosion on impact if you have a decent telescope.

Phil "bad astronomer" Plait explains:

The plume from the impact should stretch up many kilometers. It will almost certainly be too thin to be seen by amateur instruments, but the impact itself should make a bright enough flash to be seen if you have a telescope. The crater itself will be in shadow, making the light flash easier to spot. It'll only last a second or two, so if you want to observe it, be prepared!

And if the plume contains melted water particles, tossed into the local volume of space on impact, that means a self-sustaining lunar colony is a more realistic goal than ever.

via Bad Astronomy

From 1961 to 1985, the Soviet Union launched 17 missions to our other planetary neighbor. The US has since mapped Venus' surface by radar and deliberately vaporized the Magellan probe in the planet's atmosphere, but the last probes to land on Venus were Vega 1 and Vega 2, sent by the Soviet Union in 1985.

Now Russia is looking to go back to Venus, with the help of the European Space Agency. The Venera D mission would be a thorough, multi-faceted exploration of Venus, with an orbiting spacecraft, air balloons, a lander, and a kite-like "wind flyer," which would harness the winds of Venus to stay indefinitely aloft over the surface. It will not only be an expensive undertaking, but a great engineering challenge to develop crafts that can survive Venus' high temperatures and harsh conditions. Soviet landers lasted mere hours on the surface; Russian scientists working on Venera D had hoped to develop spacecraft and instruments that could last an entire 30 days, though they now think 24 hours is a more sensible goal.

Even a single day on Venus will prove difficult, but Russia is consulting with other space programs also turning toward Venus, and are officially scheduled to launch Venera D in 2016.

Russia plots return to Venus [BBC]

Part of what's really cool about looking at concept art from remakes, revamps and rethinks of classic space sagas is seeing how designers reinvent the classic shapes and original images. But another huge part is seeing how designers add new ships and create new concepts to graft onto the existing lore, and try to make it all fit together. So you have Spock's Jellyfish ship and the Narada in Star Trek, and a host of new ship designs in Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek. And sometimes, like in Lost In Space, you just have to start from scratch if you want to create something really cool looking.

Here are the revamped spaceship concept art pics (plus a few other goodies) that prove remakes may be drek on the whole, but they do give us some amazing art to drool over:

Star Trek: Reinventing the Enterprise and creating other new classic ships.

Superman Rebooted: spaceships and a Kryptonian space battlesuit.

Stargate Universe concept art: inside the Destiny

Doctor Who: redesigning the TARDIS interior, circa 2005.

Lost In Space: a weirdly awesome space fighter.

Planet Of The Apes: Awful movie, but amazing spaceship design.

Battlestar Galactica: bringing her back out of mothballs.

Star Wars prequels: the concept art is better than the movies. Really.

Researchers Chas Egan and Charles Lineweaver at the Australian National University in Canberra calculated the amount of entropy - that is, potential for chaos - in the universe, and discovered that the presence of supermassive black holes has meant that the previous estimate of entropy was wrong by a factor of 10 to 1000 times.

Egan and Lineweaver believe that the universe contains about 10 to the power of 104 units of entropy, bringing everything just that small step closer to "heat death" (where everything is the same temperature, meaning that no energy flows), Egan explains:

Our results suggest we're a little further along that road than previously thought.

Don't panic just yet, though; while the black holes are responsible for a large part of the universe's entropy, they're also essentially harmless, according to the University of Oregon's Stephen Hsu:

The entropy inside those black holes is effectively locked up in there forever.

Or 10 to the power of 102 years, at least. Which is forever enough, for now...

Mammoth black holes push universe to its doom [New Scientist]

The Herschel Space Observatory includes two cameras, studying different wavelengths of light — the British SPIRE camera (responsible for the above image) studies light measuring 250-500 microns. And the German PACS camera measures light of 70-170 microns. (Next image). They tested both cameras on a stretch of sky near the Southern Cross, and were surprised by what they found. According to Herschel:

The resulting images reveal an extremely rich reservoir of cold material in the Galactic Plane that is seen to be in a previously unsuspected state of turmoil. Interstellar material appears to be condensing in a continuous and interconnected maze of filaments and strings of newly-forming stars in all stages of development. The observations yield additional information about this cold material - such as how much there is, its mass, temperature and composition, and whether or not some of it is collapsing to form new stars.

[ESA]

PACS image

Composite SPIRE/PACS image

The Virgo Cluster is the nearest big collection of galaxies to Earth, and it's filled with a collection of gas called the intercluster medium, whose pressure drives the galaxies' own internal gas out into the cluster, roiling up the galaxies' dust. The image above is NGC 4402, and here's the other one, NGC 4522.

It's well worth reading Phil Plait's whole write-up about these galaxies and why they're so weirdly shaped, over at his "Bad Astronomer" blog at Discover Magazine.

[HubbleSite and HubbleSite via Discover Magazine]

One of the main reason for the decrease in cosmic rays, according to scientists, is the reduced solar wind. Other reasons include the sun's reduced magnetic field, and a flattening out of the solar "heliospheric current sheet," a kind of skirt around the sun that guides cosmic rays. The new level of cosmic rays still isn't as great as they were a couple hundred years ago, but it's still much higher than we're used to. Scientists claim the increase isn't dangerous to us — but that just means they haven't found any danger yet. Time to buy an extra-thick metal umbrella, I think. [NASA via Science Daily]

Above you can see a gorgeous rendition of what Spitzer saw, by a NASA artist, showing what is happening. Often disks of debris form around stars, and over millions of years solidify into lumps that turn into planets. In the case of young star LRLL 31, astronomers observed the lump forming within weeks - extremely unusual behavior. They speculate that this unusual pattern is probably caused by a companion planet or star whose gravitational pull is distorting the disk.

Astronomer James Muzerolle of Baltimore's Space Telescope Science Institute helped to discover the phenomenon, and will be publishing about it in Astrophysical Journal Letters. He said:

We don't know if planets have formed, or will form, but we are gaining a better understanding of the properties and dynamics of the fine dust that could either become, or indirectly shape, a planet. This is a unique, real-time glimpse into the lengthy process of building planets.

He discovered the phenomenon when he and his team noticed that the intensity of infrared light coming from the disk was changing dramatically over time - sometimes it would change a lot over just one week. They surmise that the change in intensity might come from more light being reflected by the disk's large lump as it passed behind its star (behind its star relative to Earth, that is).

Still, doesn't it seem kind of weird that this planet or star or whatever just wandered into the orbit of LRLL 31 so recently? And is already changing the shape of the star's accretion disk? Obviously a better explanation is that an alien civilization is building an orbital or other enormous space structure - the "planet" or "star" is actually their alien technology shaping matter together into a vast habitat for billions of aliens. Or maybe they'll make dozens of these "lumps" and turn them into generation ships. Mozorolle and his team may actually be catching a glimpse of the biggest engineering project the Earth has ever seen.

via NASA

Three papers appearing in the upcoming issue of Science Express outline the discovery of pervasive water found clinging to the surface of the moon. Infrared spectroscope measurements from three different space probes have detected absorptions that indicate the presence of water or hydroxyl (which is, itself, a strong indicator for the presence of water) on the the lunar surface, with one model suggesting water makes up a few tenths of a percent by weight in the optical surface. This water is apparently clinging to the moon's surface, rather than being absorbed by dust.

It's hardly a vast lake, and it won't yet support that lunar agricultural colony you've been dreaming of, but it's far more water than scientists ever expected to find on the moon, and it could prove a valuable resource to future lunar visitors. The researchers have also found that the concentration of water is higher toward the poles, lending credence to the theory that larger deposits of water exist near the poles, and researchers note that it's possible we'll continue to find wetter lunar regions in the future.

So where did all this water come from? Although meteors or comets may have periodically brought water to the moon, the prevailing theory among the three papers is that solar winds have carried hydrogen to the moon's surface, where it has bonded with the oxygen in the moon's own dust and produced water.

[Science Express]