Big Day For NASA

Later today, NASA will announce which private company or companies will be given the green light to build spacecraft that will carry NASA astronauts into space.

Boeing, with its long association with NASA, seems to have the inside track, but SpaceX is presumably a strong contender.  NASA would like to select two companies, to foster competition.

Next Year For Branson

Sir Richard Branson had wanted to be on Virgin Galactic's first commercial flight to the edge of space yet this year, but that event has been pushed into early next year.

VG is years behind its original schedule, but it finally seems on the verge of commercial operations.

Venus Zones

A team of astronomers at San Francisco State is proposing the development of Venus zones to attempt to define where planets might get caught in a runaway greenhouse effect as Venus has suffered.

The point is to try to separate, by distance from their stars, Venus-like worlds, which would be biologically dead, from Earth-like worlds which might support life.

Curiosity Arrives

NASA has announced that Curiosity has arrived at the base of its main goal, Mount Sharp.  The rover is to climb the mountain, studying sediment layers as it goes.

Curiosity's mission has also been granted a two-year extension, so there should be plenty of time to explore.

Water Ice Clouds On Brown Dwarf

Astronomers have found clouds of water ice in the atmosphere of a nearby brown dwarf which is three to ten times as massive as Jupiter.  The world is roughly the same temperature as Earth's North Pole.

It's the first time water ice clouds have been detected outside the Solar System.

Bentwaters

One of the major cases in UFOlogy involves a complex incident reported by USAF personnel that allegedly took place around a NATO air base in Bentwaters, England.  The Science Channel ran a documentary last night that said the UFO sent an energy beam into a storage area filled with nuclear bombs-- an element not in the original story.

Reportedly, the USAF never investigated the matter.

Y Dwarf Stars

Y dwarf stars are a newly recognized subset of brown dwarfs, objects larger than Jupiter that don't quite have the mass to ignite nuclear fusion and become full-blown stars.

Astronomers have found a Y dwarf that may have been as hot as a small star early in the universe that is now barely hotter than Earth.