http://discovermagazine.com Science, Technology, and The Future http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/12-sweet-view-icarus-comets-c-2011-n3 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/12-sweet-view-icarus-comets-c-2011-n3 <img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/12-sweet-view-icarus-comets-c-2011-n3/comet.jpg" alt="Comet C/2011 N3"> <p>Comet C/2011 N3, a 160-foot-wide ball of rock and ice discovered by astronomers on July 4, 2011, was brutally incinerated by the sun’s atmosphere two days later.</p> <p>C/2011 N3 is fondly remembered as the first comet ever captured on camera as it succumbed within the sun. Although comets appear in the solar neighborhood about twice a week, they usually disintegrate long before getting so close.</p> <p>On July 4, Lockheed Martin astrophysicist Karel Schrijver spotted the comet on satellite images and quickly determined that it was on a collision course with the sun. He tracked its death plunge on July 6 with the ultraviolet camera on the <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/main/index.html" class="external-link">NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory</a> satellite. Over an exhilarating 10 minutes, Schrijver followed C/2011 N3 as it hurtled deep into the sun’s atmosphere before vanishing some 50,000 miles from the solar surface. He chronicled these final moments in a <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1211688" class="external-link">study published in <i>Science</i></a> in January...</p> <p><em>Image: Comet C/2011 N3, seen in a series of UV images just before its death. Courtesy Wei Liu/Karel Schrijver/SDO/AIA/Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center</em></p> Andrew Grant http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/12-sweet-view-icarus-comets-c-2011-n3/key_image Thu, 10 May 2012 10:50:00 -0400 Thu, 10 May 2012 10:50:00 -0400 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/12-dead-galaxies-live-on http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/12-dead-galaxies-live-on <img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/12-dead-galaxies-live-on/deadgalaxies.jpg" alt="Antennae Galaxies and galaxy Messier 87"> <p>“Red and dead” is the unflattering label astronomers attach to giant elliptical galaxies full of aged stars. But funeral plans may be premature. With the help of the Hubble Space Telescope’s recently enhanced vision, researchers have uncovered flickers of star formation in these quiescent galaxies.</p> <p>Nobody had ever observed star birth in red-and-dead galaxies...</p> <p><i>Dull, red-and-dead galaxies like Messier 87 (below) may not look as pretty as the youthful Antennae Galaxies (above), but they, too, contain regions where stars are forming. Courtesy NASA Hubble Heritage Team/ESA Hubble Collaboration</i></p> Adam Hadhazy http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/12-dead-galaxies-live-on/key_image Mon, 07 May 2012 11:50:00 -0400 Mon, 07 May 2012 11:50:00 -0400 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/08-star-party http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/08-star-party <img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/08-star-party/star.jpg" alt="star"></p> <p>Vast clouds of star-forming gas and dust burst into view in this newly released image of the constellations Cassiopeia and Cepheus, taken by the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise/">Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer</a> satellite, or WISE. Space-based <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_astronomy">infrared telescopes</a> like WISE allow astronomers to see past the hot, bright stars that dominate visible-light images and probe the subtle, cold regions of gas and dust where stars are born. The most frigid stuff, which can be –280 degrees Fahrenheit, appears red here; warmer objects look bluer...</p> http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/08-star-party/key_image Sat, 28 Apr 2012 20:50:00 -0400 Sat, 28 Apr 2012 20:50:00 -0400 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/08-saints-sinners-satellite-crashers-alien-hunter-funders http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/08-saints-sinners-satellite-crashers-alien-hunter-funders <p><b>Saint: The Environmental Protection Agency</b> 
In January the EPA launched a <a href="http://ghgdata.epa.gov/ghgp/main.do" class="external-link">public database</a> of power plants, landfills, and other facilities that emit at least 25,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases annually. In addition to providing eye-popping statistics—for example, the dirtiest 3 percent of these large facilities account for 45 percent of their total emissions—the registry should put pressure on companies to cut emissions and to report them accurately.</p> <p><b>Sinners: Nuclear Looters</b> 
Over the last year political turmoil in Egypt has led to looting of shops, restaurants, and museums. Now it has spread to a scarier target: nuclear storage sites. In January, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that unidentified thieves had <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/radioactive-material-stolen-in-egypt-1.9867" class="external-link">stolen “low-level radioactive sources”</a> from a safe at El Dabaa, the planned site of Egypt’s first nuclear power plant... http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/08-saints-sinners-satellite-crashers-alien-hunter-funders/key_image Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:45:00 -0400 Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:45:00 -0400 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/mar/31-could-one-of-these-worlds-be-e-t-2019s-home http://discovermagazine.com/2012/mar/31-could-one-of-these-worlds-be-e-t-2019s-home <p><img src="habitability.jpg" alt="planets" align="right"></p> <p>Of the more than 700 planets discovered outside our solar system, none yet fit the description alien hunters dream about: an Earth-like planet in an Earth-like orbit around a sunlike star. But some scientists want to broaden the parameters of their search. In November a team led by Washington State University astrobiologist <a href="http://www.sees.wsu.edu/Faculty/SMakuch/index.html" class="external-link">Dirk Schulze-Makuch</a> devised the Planetary Habitability Index, or PHI, a scoring system for distant worlds that measures their suitability for any kind of life, not merely life as we know it. “We can’t go after only the Earth model of life,” he says. “You really want to be open-minded.”</p> <p>Under Schulze-Makuch’s criteria, a faraway world racks up points if it has a solid surface and an atmosphere, which act together to support chemical reactions and deflect damaging radiation. Liquid water is not a prerequisite for a high score: A planet with liquids on the surface receives more points than a dry world, but the presence of water confers no additional advantage. “If you didn’t know that water worked on Earth,” Schulze-Makuch says, “you might think methanol would work much better for life.”</p> <p>The PHI scores of bodies within the solar system reflect Schulze-Makuch’s hypothesis that the most Earth-like places are not necessarily the friendliest for life. Earth gets a near-perfect score of 0.96 on the 0 to 1 scale (it just has less available energy now than it did when life originated 4 billion years ago). But second place goes to Saturn’s moon Titan (0.64), which hosts <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080213.html" class="external-link">vast lakes of liquid hydrocarbons</a> but has surface temperatures of –300 degrees Fahrenheit. Mars, the target of more than a dozen robotic missions to hunt for signs of microbial life, comes in third at 0.59... </p> Gregory Mone http://discovermagazine.com/2012/mar/31-could-one-of-these-worlds-be-e-t-2019s-home/key_image Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:30:00 -0400 Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:30:00 -0400 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/mar/06-out-there-moon-is-full-of-surprises http://discovermagazine.com/2012/mar/06-out-there-moon-is-full-of-surprises <img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2012/mar/06-out-there-moon-is-full-of-surprises/moon.jpg" alt="moon"> <p>I watched the first manned lunar landing in 1969 on a low-
definition television in a glass-enclosed back porch. As I followed the grainy images of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the dusty lunar soil, I could see the moon peeking through tree branches overhead. It looked as it always had, but somehow different. That sudden change in perspective was the whole point of the Apollo 11 landing. It wasn’t a scientific mission. It was an exercise of cold war hubris intended to burnish America’s image and humble its Communist rival. With Armstrong’s one small first step, though, the space race was over, and the entire Apollo program rapidly wound down. The 1971 image of Alan Shepard hammering a golf ball across the moonscape with a six iron during Apollo 14 remains etched in the popular mind as the end of lunar exploration.</p> <p>But ask a planetary scientist and you will get a different spin. Jeffrey Taylor of the University of Hawaii says it was the final Apollo missions of 1972 that propelled lunar science and transformed our understanding of the moon. The stars weren’t the guys in the space suits but the 842 pounds of rocks the astronauts brought back to Earth before their program was disbanded.</p> <p>Even as Apollo was coming to an end, those lunar rocks were catapulting lunar research into new territory, settling centuries-old questions about the moon’s geology and history. One debate revolved around the nature of the moon’s “seas,” or maria—the smooth, broad, dark-colored regions that create the “man in the moon” markings. Researchers put a sliver of moon rock under a microscope, and the issue was settled instantly. The maria are solidified lava flows, vast outpourings of basaltic rock from around three and a half billion years ago. Then in the mid-1970s, planetary scientist William K. Hartmann and a few others proposed that the moon was formed by the collision of a Mars-size planet with the Earth. That dramatic idea encountered skepticism until an analysis of the lunar rocks showed that they have the same mix of oxygen isotopes as rocks found on Earth, strongly suggesting a shared origin. The giant impact theory is now the widely accepted explanation of the moon’s origin...</p> <p><i>Image: Six views of the moon from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's Wide Angle Camera, which captures almost the entire surface of the moon once a month.</i></p> Paul Raeburn http://discovermagazine.com/2012/mar/06-out-there-moon-is-full-of-surprises/key_image Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:15:00 -0400 Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:15:00 -0400 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/14-back-to-the-final-frontier http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/14-back-to-the-final-frontier <p><img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/14-back-to-the-final-frontier/lunar.jpg"></p> <p>Spring 2001, amid the manicured lawns of the Princeton University campus, I was recumbent in an office chair with my mind in the universe when the phone rang. It was the White House. They wanted me to join a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_the_Future_of_the_United_States_Aerospace_Industry" class="external-link">commission to study the health of the aerospace industry</a>. I agreed, but at first I was indifferent. I don’t know how to fly an airplane. But then I read up on that sector and realized they had lost half a million jobs in recent years. Something bad was going on.</p> <p>The commission’s first meeting was to be at the end of September. And then came 9/11. I live—then and now—four blocks from Ground Zero. My windows are right there. I was supposed to go to Princeton that morning, but I had some overdue writing to finish, so I stayed home. One plane goes in; another plane goes in. At that point, how indifferent could I be? I had just lost my neighborhood to two airplanes. Duty called. I was a changed person. Not only had the nation been attacked, so had my backyard.</p> <p>I distinctly remember walking into the first meeting. The 11 other commissioners filled the room with testosterone. There was General this and Secretary of the Navy that and Member of Congress this. It’s not as though I have no testosterone, but it’s Bronx testosterone. The kind where, if you get into a fight on the street, you kick the guy’s butt. This I-build-missile-systems testosterone is a whole other kind. Even the women on the commission had it: A former congresswoman from the South, who had an Air Force base in her district, deployed a vocal tone perfectly tuned to say, “Kiss my ass.” Another one was chief aerospace analyst for Morgan Stanley; having grown up as a Navy brat, she had the industry by the gonads.</p> <p>On that commission, we traveled the world to see what cultural or economic forces might be influencing the aerospace industry’s stability here in America. We visited China before they put a man in space. I carried with me the common stereotype of everybody’s riding bicycles along broad boulevards, but instead, Audis and Mercedes Benzes and Volkswagens filled the streets. Cars dominated the roads, not bicycles. Then I went home and looked at the labels on all my stuff; half of it had been made in China. Lots of our money was already going there.</p> <p>On a side tour we visited the Great Wall. A tourist attraction, of course, but in its day, a <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wall_of_China#Early_walls">military project</a>. I looked far and wide but saw no evidence of technology, just the bricks that comprised the wall. As an experiment, I pulled out my cell phone and seamlessly managed to call my mother in New York. “Oh, Neil, you’re home so soon!” was her first remark. No, I was 8,000 miles away, yet that cell phone connection was the best I’ve ever had—ever. Nobody in China is uttering America’s cell phone mantra, “Can you hear me now?”</p> <p>So when China announced, “We’re going to put somebody in orbit,” sure enough, I knew it was going to happen...</p> Neil deGrasse Tyson http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/14-back-to-the-final-frontier/key_image Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:05:00 -0400 Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:05:00 -0400 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/08-tools-trade-curiosity-nasas-laser-blasting-mars-robot http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/08-tools-trade-curiosity-nasas-laser-blasting-mars-robot <p><img alt="Curiosity rover, with laser" src="http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/08-tools-trade-curiosity-nasas-laser-blasting-mars-robot/tools.jpg"></p> <p>Sometime this August, a six-wheeled, sedan-size mars 
rover named Curiosity should begin rolling across the surface of the Red Planet. The vehicle, carried to its destination 
aboard the Mars Science Laboratory, will start its journey 
on the floor of Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide depression marked with channels suggesting a watery past. But scientists have not yet decided exactly what Curiosity and its versatile suite of instruments, including the ChemCam, will explore first.</p> <p>Mounted atop the rover’s mast, ChemCam’s <b>infrared laser</b> can focus a pulse of energy equivalent to the output of a million lightbulbs on a target as far as 25 feet away. At the beginning of each Martian day, scientists will choose a zone of interest, such as an intriguing rock outcrop, and instruct the rover to fire pulses around the area. Each time the laser hits rock, the impact point will erupt into a tiny ball of plasma, explains principal investigator Roger Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico...</p> Gregory Mone http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/08-tools-trade-curiosity-nasas-laser-blasting-mars-robot/key_image Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:25:00 -0400 Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:25:00 -0400 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/photos/14-earth-unearthly-exotic-places-alien-planets http://discovermagazine.com/photos/14-earth-unearthly-exotic-places-alien-planets <a href="http://discovermagazine.com/photos/14-earth-unearthly-exotic-places-alien-planets">Click through to view gallery</a> http://discovermagazine.com/photos/14-earth-unearthly-exotic-places-alien-planets/key_image Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:13:28 -0400 Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:13:28 -0400 Photo Gallery http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/16-how-to-survive-the-end-of-the-universe http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/16-how-to-survive-the-end-of-the-universe <img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/16-how-to-survive-the-end-of-the-universe/opener.jpg" align="right" alt=""> <p>Next year will be a doozy for doomsayers. depending on the prophecy, the world is predestined to expire by means of a solar storm, asteroid strike, rogue-planet collision, plague, falling stars, earthquake, debt crisis, or some combination thereof. Of course, nobody seems to be preparing for any of these impending 2012 apocalypses, with the exception of a porn studio reportedly building a clothing-optional underground bunker.</p> <p>And why should we? Scientifically speaking, the prophecies are strictly ballyhoo. Physicists can do a lot better. When it comes to end-times scenarios, cosmological data-crunchers have at their disposal far more meaningful prognostication tools that can tell us how it’s really going to end—not just Earth, but the whole universe. Best of all, they can tell us how to survive it.</p> <p>Science, oddly, is a lot better at predicting things like the death of stars than next week’s weather. The same laws of physics that enable scientists to study the Big Bang that occurred 13.7 billion years ago also allow them to gaze into the future with great precision. And few people have peered farther than University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomer Greg Laughlin, science’s leading soothsayer. As a graduate student in 1992, he was plugging away at a simple computer simulation of star formation when he broke for lunch and accidentally left the simulation running. When he returned an hour later, the simulation had advanced 100 million billion years, much further into the future than most scientists ever think (or dare) to explore.</p> <p>The program itself didn’t reveal anything terribly startling—the simulated star had long since gone cold and died—but Laughlin was intrigued by the concept of using physical simulations to traverse enormous gulfs of time. “It opened my eyes to the fact that things are going to evolve and are still going to be there in timescales that dwarf the current age of the universe,” he says.</p> <p>Four years later, still fascinated, Laughlin teamed up with Fred Adams, a physics professor at the University of Michigan, to investigate the future of the universe more rigorously. Working in their spare time, the two researchers coauthored a 57-page paper in the journal<i> Reviews of Modern Physics</i> that detailed a succession of future apocalypses: the death of the sun, the end of the stars, and multiple scenarios for the fate of the universe as a whole...</p> Andrew Grant; illustration by Chris Gall http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/16-how-to-survive-the-end-of-the-universe/key_image Tue, 28 Feb 2012 10:25:00 -0500 Tue, 28 Feb 2012 10:25:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/08-donald-kessler-prophet-of-space-trash http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/08-donald-kessler-prophet-of-space-trash <img src="http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/08-donald-kessler-prophet-of-space-trash/spacetrash.jpg" align="right" alt="">Colliding satellites add to the expanding mass of junk in space. <p>In 2009, after two telecom satellites smashed into each other, the U.S. National Research Council commissioned a team of experts to examine whether NASA was doing enough to address the growing problem of space junk. When it came time to pick the chair of the panel, the choice was obvious: Don Kessler, a 71-year-old retired NASA scientist who has been warning the world about orbital debris for more than 30 years.</p> <p>Kessler grew up dreaming of becoming an astronomer but had no money for college, so he joined the Army. After he got out in 1961, he returned home to Houston, where NASA had recently established its manned spaceflight headquarters. Kessler was accepted into the agency’s cooperative education program, which allowed him to earn a degree in physics.</p> <p>He started out studying meteoroids, but his attention soon shifted to debris from space launches. By 1978 he had published his landmark paper, “Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites,” detailing the science behind what is now unofficially known as the Kessler Syndrome: Space junk collides with other space junk, producing more and more fragments, until the debris eventually renders low Earth orbit (within about 1,000 miles of Earth’s surface) impassable. Junk was sparse in the 1970s, though, and people tended to think of low orbit as part of infinite space. “Nobody believed it initially,” Kessler says...</p> Gregory Mone http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/08-donald-kessler-prophet-of-space-trash/key_image Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:15:00 -0500 Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:15:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/96 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/96 <p>
When <i>Atlantis</i> came back to Earth last July, marking the end of the U.S. space shuttle program, many lamented the passing of NASA’s big-dreams era (see Top 100 <a href="http://72.32.204.61/2012/jan-feb/06" class="external-link">story #6, a memorial for the space shuttle</a>). The cover of <i>The Economist</i> even went so far as to proclaim “the end of the space age.” But that’s about as far from the truth as Earth is from Mars. We are in fact at the dawn of what might be called Space Age 2.0, in which private citizens will soon be making regular flights to suborbit. Many would therefore argue that the seminal event in spaceflight last year was not the final mission of <i>Atlantis</i> but the continuing evolution of <i>SpaceShipTwo</i>, Virgin Galactic’s two-pilot, six-passenger spacefaring rocket ship...</p> Sam Howe Verhovek http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/96/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:55:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:55:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/88 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/88 <p><img alt="gamma ray map" src="http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/88/cosmos.jpg"></p> <p>This is the night sky as seen in gamma rays, radiation emitted by the most energetic objects in the universe. The bright streak across the middle 
shows where high-speed particles collide with gas and dust scattered between 
the stars of the Milky Way. Pulsars and supernova remnants—relics 
of exploded stars—show up as bright dots close to the centerline. Many of the red spots above and below are distant, active galaxies where massive black holes stir up gas and sling it around at close to the speed of light...</p> <p><i>Image: NASA/DOE/FERMI LAT Collaboration</i></p> Mary Beth Griggs http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/88/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:50:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:50:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/79 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/79 <p>The discovery of planets orbiting other stars has made headlines in the past few years. But 2011 also brought a much stranger brand of planet news: In May astronomers announced that they had discovered 10 worlds orbiting nothing at all...</p> Gillian Conahan http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/79/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:50:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:50:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/75 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/75 <p>Dramatic images of dried-up floodplains and apparent riverbeds have most astronomers convinced that liquid water once gushed on Mars, perhaps supporting ancient life. But last summer NASA astronomers announced that water may still be flowing on the Red Planet...</p> Adam Hadhazy http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/75/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:45:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:45:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/66 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/66 <p>Last August NASA scientists offered a first look at a peculiar class of stellar wallflowers called Y dwarfs. Unlike typical stars, which burn steadily at thousands of degrees, the warmest of these Jupiter-size objects are just hot enough to bake cookies—and the coolest barely break room temperature...</p> Gillian Conahan
 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/66/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:40:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:40:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/53 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/53 <p>The platinum in your wedding 
ring and the gold in your dental fillings most likely arrived on Earth in a furious meteoric bombardment 200 million years after the planet’s formation, University of Bristol geologist Matthias Willbold reports. According to standard planetary formation models, the gold, platinum, and tungsten that were present when Earth was born should have quickly bonded to iron and sunk into the planet’s core. Those precious metals are thousands of times more prevalent on the surface of Earth and in its mantle than the models predict...</p> Elizabeth Svoboda http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/53/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:40:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:40:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/52 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/52 <p> When astronomers caught their first glimpse of the superstorm that swept Saturn last year, it appeared as just a small dot on the planet’s hazy surface. Within a few weeks, the dot had transformed into a monster tempest, spawning a vortex nearly as wide as Earth and lightning strikes 10,000 times as energetic as those of terrestrial storms...</p> Jennifer Barone http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/52/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:35:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:35:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/41 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/41 <p>The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, was obliterated on September 23 after a productive and unexpectedly long scientific life. It was 20 years old. The cause of death was atmospheric drag...</p> Gregory Mone http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/41/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:30:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:30:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/37 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/37 <p>The National Academy of Sciences has estimated that a major solar storm could cause $2 trillion in damages, frying GPS satellites and short-circuiting electrical grids. Many of those storms originate at sunspots, dark blemishes on the sun’s surface that are wellsprings of magnetic activity. But help is on the way: Last August scientists reported the first successful predictions of individual sunspots days before they appeared, opening up the possibility of accurately forecasting severe space weather...</p> Adam Hadhazy http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/37/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:20:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:20:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/33 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/33 <p>The most complete census of near-earth asteroids has sharply reduced the estimated risk that a giant rock will collide with our planet and drive humans—like the dinosaurs before them—into extinction...</p> Paul Raeburn http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/33/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:15:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:15:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/25 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/25 <p><i>Laurel, Maryland—</i>On the appointed afternoon last March 17, as the Messenger spacecraft prepared to insert itself into orbit around Mercury, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory braced for hundreds of visitors intent on sharing the historic moment. The lab—called by its acronym APL (rhymes with JPL, as in the NASA facility on the West Coast)—lies on a bucolic campus halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Most of the facility’s 400 acres are restricted, including the areas dedicated to the construction of marvels such as Messenger and the New Horizons spacecraft now heading for a 2015 rendezvous with Pluto. Aside from anxiously anticipating the evening’s crucial maneuver, Messenger project manager Peter Bedini was concerned about granting his official guests the prime viewing positions they coveted inside the tense, cramped quarters of the Mission Operations Center, APL’s version of Mission Control.</p> <p>The difficulty of orbiting Mercury, the solar system’s innermost planet, has discouraged attempts until now. To catch Mercury in its tight orbit around the sun, a spacecraft must change speed by more than 60,000 miles an hour after leaving Earth, difficult to do with rocket propulsion alone...</p> Dava Sobel http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/25/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:10:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:10:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/23 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/23 <p>Earth’s closest celestial neighbor has a secret, violent past, judging from two reports published last August in the journal <i>Nature</i>. One finding may explain the moon’s peculiar two-faced quality. In the 1960s early space probes showed that the lunar farside—the half never seen from Earth—is covered with steep, scarred mountains and none of the broad, flat volcanic “seas” that mark the side that points toward us. Erik Asphaug, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, traces this split personality back to a time when Earth had not one moon but two...</p> Paul Raeburn http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/23/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:05:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:05:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/16 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/16 <p>After traveling four years and 1.7 billion miles, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrived at Vesta last July, the first stop on its tour of the largest asteroids in the solar system. Until Dawn’s arrival, the only clues about Vesta came from grainy telescope images and meteorites that had fallen to Earth, many of which are believed to have come from the giant asteroid. Dawn’s 1-million-pixel photographs are quickly revealing that Vesta’s landscape is surprisingly complex for a floating rock the size of New Mexico. “Seeing the surface up close for the first time, in its true glory, is amazing,” says lead scientist Christopher Russell. “We’re in awe”...</p> Jennifer Barone http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/16/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:00:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:00:00 -0500 Print Article http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/12 http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/12 On September 29, the flames of a Long March-2FT1 rocket lit the night sky over the Gobi Desert as China launched its Tiangong-1 space lab, a first step toward the construction and deployment of an orbiting manned space station by 2020. That happens to be the year when the International Space Station will be retired and sent on a fiery trajectory into the Pacific Ocean. If everything proceeds according to schedule, China will then be operating the world’s only space station... Paul Raeburn http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/12/key_image Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:55:00 -0500 Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:55:00 -0500 Print Article