Perhaps one of the more defining and upsetting moments of the decade for 80′s kids was when we all basically saw a whole bunch of astronauts die in real-time on television during the ill-fated launch of the Challenger, but if Roger Boisjoly had his way, that tragedy could have been avoided.

Back then, there was no 24-hour news cycle, and the event left many Americans very upset- aside from the incident itself, my clearest recollection was a very special episode of Punky Brewster to help kids process lingering grief from witnessing the tragedy on so many wheeled in VCRs in school auditoriums. But as out of touch with the culture of today it may seem- exposing snowflakes to something as unpredictable and now, as we know, dangerous as a shuttle launch- it came as an utter shock to many that the incident played out as it did- but not Roger Boisjoly.

Boisjoly was a rocket booster engineer at a NASA subcontractor, and he passed away in Utah last month at the age of 73. 25 years ago, he tried to warn colleagues and higher ups about impending disaster if the Challenger launched on a cold day- NPR spoke to Boisjoly after the disaster but before he became known as a whistleblower- and paid dearly for that- during the investigation into the tragedy. The site explains:

Six months before the Challenger explosion, he predicted “a catastrophe of the highest order” involving “loss of human life” in a memo to managers at [contractor Morton] Thiokol… The problem, Boisjoly wrote, was the elastic seals at the joints of the multi-stage booster rockets. They tended to stiffen and unseal in cold weather and NASA’s ambitious shuttle launch schedule included winter lift-offs with risky temperatures, even in Florida.

The New York Times ran a profile of the engineer after his death, saying that few commended Boisjoly for his role in trying to prevent the tragic shuttle explosion:

He had headaches, double-vision and depression, he said. He yelled at his dog and his daughters and skipped church to avoid people. He filed two suits against Thiokol; both were dismissed…He later said he was sustained by a single gesture of support. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, hugged him after his appearance before the commission.

“She was the only one,” he said in a whisper to a Newsday reporter in 1988. “The only one.”

According to the Times, Boisjoly was eventually awarded the Prize for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and did hundreds of events speaking about corporate ethics and responsibility.

Roger Boisjoly, Scientists Who Fought to Prevent Challenger Launch, Dies at 73 is a post from: The Inquisitr

Could some form of microbial life possibly exist on Mars? According to the findings of an international team of researchers, it is highly unlikely that life in any form currently exists on Mars, as conditions on the planet have been far too hostile for too long.

The team of researchers spent three years going over soil data collected from NASA’s Phoenix Lander mission. Based on the data, researchers believe that Mars has been arid for as much as 600 million years, which greatly limits the probability that life exists on the planet.

“We found that even though there is an abundance of ice, Mars has been experiencing a super-drought that may well have lasted hundreds of millions of years,” study leader author Tom Pike, from Imperial College London, said in a statement. “We think the Mars we know today contrasts sharply with its earlier history, which had warmer and wetter periods and which may have been more suited to life.”

That doesn’t mean that scientists are ready to rule out life on Mars entirely, however unlikely it may be.

“Future NASA and ESA missions that are planned for Mars will have to dig deeper to search for evidence of life, which may still be taking refuge underground,” Pike said.

via

Mars too dry to support life, researchers say is a post from: The Inquisitr

Last month NASA released the highest resolution “Blue Marble” image of Earth to date and now the US Space Agency has updated its image repository with the flip side photograph of our planet.

The first image (shown below) featured the western hemisphere while the new image (above) shows the flip side on the eastern hemisphere.

You’re actually staring at at composite image which was created by Nasa Goddard oceanographer Norman Kuring who required six different orbit images from the satellite that took the photos over an eight-hour period on Jan. 23, 2012. The photos were then combined to create the effect you see at the start of this post.

Here’s the Western Hemisphere ‘Blue Marble’ Photo in case you missed it the first time around:

If Blue Marble imagery looks familiar to you that might be because the photograph taken in 2002 is a default background on Apple’s iPhone.  The original Blue Marble photograph was taken on Dec. 7, 1972.

Do you think NASA is getting better at showing us clear representations of Earth through Blue Marble imagery which continues to inspire better renditions each time a new image is released?

NASA Releases Second Super High-Resolution ‘Blue Marble’ Photograph is a post from: The Inquisitr

Scientists attempting to map our galaxy have found a trip-star system that could potentially support life and which is only 22 light years away from Earth.

The rocky planet is known as  GJ 667Cc and is 4.5 times the size of Earth and orbits in the middle of the ‘Goldilocks zone.”

The planets destination is in an area that can sustain water without boiling or freezing.

GJ 667Cc orbits a red dwarf star every 28 days and appears to absorb as much light energy as Earth does from its sun.

According to the astronomers who spotted the planet and accompanying trip-star system:

“If it has an atmosphere, it’s probably reddish all the time, because the star is really red,” and “It would be like being evening all the time.”

The group also says that the system’s binary stars would be very prominent in the planets sky.

At this time researchers must conduct more researcher to determine GJ 66vCc’s atmosphere and to determine if one side is stuck facing the sun while the other faces away which would greatly decrease the chance that the planet can sustain life.

It may be a “super earth” but only time can tell if that’s actually the case.

Scientists Discover “Super Earth” Which Could Possibly Support Life is a post from: The Inquisitr

Sorry about the bad play on a Star Wars idiom but it just seem to work in this case given that the discovery of a potential planet is of one located in a galaxy that is only visible, if you can call it that, due to data collected by the Kepler telescope.

The driving force behind the possible discovery didn’t come from a recognized astronomer but rather an amateur by the name of Chris Holmes who was motivated to check out the data collected via the Planethunters.org web site after watching watching the UK’ Stargazing Live show.

Those that take the time to go to the Planethunters site can look through charts of light as measured by the Kepler telescope and make note when they see a dip in light levels as that suggests that a planet may have passed in front of a star.

In the space of 48 hours during the run of Stargazing Live broadcasters, visitors to the site checked through more than a million images. Among those was one viewed by Holmes, who saw a light dip that appeared to be from a planet passing the orange dwarf star SPH10066540. His observation allowed researchers to look back through the dataset and find several other instances. However, it will take several more observations before the planet’s existence can be formally confirmed.

via Geeks are Sexy

I wonder if they’ll name the planet after Chris?

Inspired by BBC Stargazing Live amateur discovers new planet far, far away. is a post from: The Inquisitr

University of Rochester Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Eric Mamajek is leading a team of scientists who have located what is the first ringed system to transit a Sun-like star outside our own solar system. The planet was discovered as part of the international SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) and All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) projects. Mamajek says:

“After we ruled out the eclipse being due to a spherical star or a circumstellar disk passing in front of the star, I realized that the only plausible explanation was some sort of dust ring system orbiting a smaller companion — basically a ‘Saturn on steroids’.”

Plenty of questions remain about the new planet, though one theory suggests the body at the center of the rings is a planet in the late stages of formation. Failing that, it could be a very low-mass star or a brown dwarf.

There’s also considerable interest about what lies between the rings of this new discovery. There are two colossal gaps between the rings, usually a sign that there is something there – be it a small moon or some other body – with enough mass to gravitationally shape the ring edges.

Mamajek and his team are now preparing to use southern hemisphere telescopes to establish the radial velocity of the star, and detect the gravitational tug and light of the companion.

It was only last month that astronomers found ‘Kepler 20-f,’ one of the most Earth-like planets discovered to date.

See also: A storm eight times the surface of Earth rips across Saturn

Saturn-like Ringed Planet Observed Outside Solar System is a post from: The Inquisitr

Utilizing the Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers have discovered a cluster of developing galaxies an astonishing 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, making the galaxy clusters the oldest and most distant galaxy clusters ever observed.

Discovered during a near-infrared light spectrum sky survey of distant galaxies, the cluster of five galaxies, shown in the image above, existed just 600 million years after the big bang. In cosmic terms, that makes each of the five galaxy clusters newborn babies, so to speak.

“These galaxies formed during the earliest stages of galaxy assembly, when galaxies had just started to cluster together,” Michele Trent, of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom said in a statement “The result confirms our theoretical understanding of the buildup of galaxy clusters. And, Hubble is just powerful enough to find the first examples of them at this distance.”

Astronomers say that the galaxies within these clusters are about a tenth of the size of our own Milky Way galaxy, but are actually just as bright as our own galaxy. This is the result of galaxies feeding on a large amount of materials and gas from the merging of galaxies within the clusters.

While the galaxies may appear to be relatively small as they’re observed today, scientists expect that the galaxies have likely gotten much larger 13.1 billion years later, and may even be the same size, if not bigger than, the Milky Way.

via Space.com

Hubble spots the most distant galaxy cluster ever observed is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Moon and the planet Venus made an appearance in the night sky on Monday, but if you missed it, worry not – Venus will be appearing again on Tuesday.

In fact, by sunset on Tuesday evening, the Moon and Venus should be easily visible in clear conditions with little or no haze. As in the picture above, Venus will appear as a bright dot below the Moon, which will be a 12 percent crescent.

To prepare for your Venus sighting, it’s advised you check your south-southwest sky during the late afternoon hours of Tuesday to locate the Moon. As the sun starts to go down, Venus will become visible to the naked eye. It will be positioned approximately one fist (held at arm’s length) below the Moon – scientifically speaking, the distance between the pair will be 10 degrees.

As the night sky begins to darken, Venus will likely drop out of sight, around two and a half hours after sunset.  It shouldn’t be too hard to spot while visible, however – scientists say it will shine 11 times brighter than Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

Tuesday evening should also have a case of “earthshine” – that’s sunlight reflected by the Earth that dimly illuminates the Moon’s dark portion with a faint gray-blue glow. It gives the Moon a more three-dimensional appearance than usual.

Venus is a whopping 197 million kilometers from the Earth, while the Moon is a comparative stroll away – 379,000 km. That’s why the latter seems to move more rapidly against background stars than Venus.

If anybody’s planning a Venus viewing, let us know how you get on!

Moon and Venus to Appear in Sky on Tuesday is a post from: The Inquisitr

One of man’s dreams has always to be able to go out into space and find a new home for us to screw-up live on and one of the places has always been Mars, even though it has been shown to be barren of any kind of life as we know it.

As much as we might like to think that one day we could see the human race expanded to colonies on Mars the common consensus among scientists is that we couldn’t survive on the planet without a whole lot of help. That opinion could be changing though is a new study of the planet suggests that Mars could be more life-sustaining than was originally thought.

The study was carried out by the Australian National University and working with the most up to date data that is now available they looked at the planet as a whole rather than on particular areas of the planet as previous scientists had done.

What they found was that there is 3% of Mars that could sustain life, the thing is that the areas they are talking about are underground.

The Martian atmosphere has a bad combination of low temperature and low pressure. When put together, it means that liquid water cannot exist in most places on the planet’s surface. However, Lineweaver believes that the additional pressure of soil could mean that water exists below ground. Additionally, warmth from the planet’s core could render some regions of the planet’s subsurface warm enough for bacteria and other micro-organisms.

via Geekosystem

If I was younger I’d sign up in a minute to be able to have a shot at living on Mars. Hell, now that I think of it I’d do it even now, even though my wife might not like the idea.

Turns out that a large part of Mars could support life is a post from: The Inquisitr

Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons, has recently been in the spotlight after scientists found that the icy moon may have not only a world-spanning ocean beneath the ice-covered surface, but also lakes as well.

The moon is back in the spotlight again today as NASA announced they’re cooking up a possible mission to send two landers to Europa by around 2020, with both arriving to the icy moon some six years later, Space.com reports.

Europa has long been considered one of the prime candidates for harboring alien lifeforms in our solar system, and the proposed mission sets out to determine whether or not life actually can exist on the moon.

“Europa, I think, is the premier place to go for extant life,” said JPL’s Kevin Hand. “Europa really does give us this opportunity to look for living life in the ocean that is there today, and has been there for much of the history of the solar system.”

The mission, if given the green light, won’t be an easy task for NASA. Jupiter is constantly bombarding its surrounding moons with massive amounts of radiation, which would be harmful to the landers. To compensate, NASA will have to keep the lander’s time on the moon brief; about seven days, Hand says.

The goal of this mission, Hand explains, isn’t to find alien life but to determine whether the essential building blocks for life exist on the surface. During the landers’ brief stay, each 700-pound robot would use mass spectrometer to detect various organic chemicals, and seismometers and cameras would be used to shed light on Europa’s geology.

Hand stresses that the mission is still in its conceptual stages. “This was an engineering proof of concept,” Hand said of the study. “We were just trying to see, ‘Could this be done?’”

Source: Space.com

NASA Looking Into Mission to Send Landers to Europa is a post from: The Inquisitr

I understand that we are running out of spaces where we can have out mortal remains buried so that everyone can come and pay their last respects but the idea of polluting the great expanse of space with an ever increasing number of shiny urns doesn’t strike me as the greatest of ideas.

However this doesn’t seem to have fazed the government of Virginia in the least as they are floating the idea that you could get a tax deduction of up to $8,000 is you agree to ship your remains into space once you pass away.

Not only are they trying to have you believe you could save some money on your taxes but they are also pushing the idea that this would be great for the local economy, specifically as a way to boost visitors to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island.

Mourners would eat at local restaurants, stay at hotels and visit attractions, said Donna Bozza, director of the Eastern Shore of Virginia Tourism Commission, according to WTVR’s website.

“If you’re spending that money to go to space, you’re going to want your peeps to cheer you on,” she said.

via PhysOrg

Right now the whole space funeral business is dominated by a company called Celetis out of Huston Texas, where costs to have your remains launched into space can start at $1,000 up to $10,000 to have your remains sent to the Moon.

Send your ashes into space and get a tax break – What?! is a post from: The Inquisitr

A team of astronomers have discovered two massive black holes that are now the largest black holes known to exist throughout the known universe.

The team, led by astronomers at UC Berkeley, discovered the unimaginably large black holes within clusters of elliptical galaxies nearly 300 million light years from our own galaxy, which in galactic terms makes it a couple cities over from the Milky Way. The researchers say that each black hole is 10 billion times more massive than our own sun.

By contrast, the previous black hole to hold the record for being the largest in the known universe was “only” six billion times more massive than our own sun, which itself is roughly 100 times larger than Earth.

“I’m very excited right now because I think learning about these black holes will tell us about how the galaxies were formed. We think they were formed when their parent galaxies were formed,” said Chung-Pei Ma, a professor of astronomy at Berkeley who was involved in the findings. “I’m just very curious to know how these black holes got so monstrous. This is an enormous amount of mass in a very small space.”

These particular black holes are believed to be the remnants of violent quasars during the early formation of the universe. Black holes are believed to form when a massive star collapses in on itself.

“I would think of a black hole as a monster lurking in space that you cannot see but it’s capable of sucking in material if you go really close to it. It’s a region in the universe with the strongest gravity,” Ma told ABC News.

via ABC News

[Image: Artist's concept by Pete Marenfeld/NOAO]

Black holes 10 billion times more massive than our sun discovered is a post from: The Inquisitr

Yesterday, it was looking as if Russia’s Phobos-Grunt probe was as good as dead. Ever since its launch on November 8, officials were having difficulties making contact with the craft after it failed to fire its engines to propel itself out of Earth’s orbit.

Fortunately, things are starting to look at least a little bit brighter for Russia’s probe today as the European Space Agency reports that a station in Australia has been able to successfully receive and send signals to the craft.

The 29,000-pound, $170 million Phobos-Grunt probe was on a mission to land on Mars’ largest moon, Phobos, and collect a soil sample which would then be brought back home to planet Earth. Whether or not the probe can carry out its mission is still uncertain – and Russian officials admit that it’s unlikely it can – but today’s news at least brought some hope that the craft can carry on.

The craft is also carrying China’s first interplanetary probe, Yinghuo 1, along with it, so Russia isn’t the only nation holding out hope that full communication and control of the spacecraft can be established.

Both the ESA and NASA are working closely with Russian officials to come up with a solution to the problem, with the ESA going as far as to modify one of its satellite dishes.

“In the past few days, ESA’s Perth dish was modified by the addition of a ‘feedhorn’ antenna at the side of the main dish so as to transmit very low-power signals over a wide angle in the hopes of triggering a response from the satellite,” the space agency said.

via Space.com

[Image credit: AP/Russian Roscosmoc space agency, HO]

Russia’s Mars probe responds after week of silence is a post from: The Inquisitr

Europa, one of Jupiter’s 64 known moons, has been one of the prime candidates for possible life outside of planet Earth since it was first observed up close in the 1990s. Covered almost entirely in ice, scientists believed that in all likelihood vast oceans exist deep below the ice, which may just be warm enough to support aquatic organisms.

New research suggests that Europa may not just have a gigantic ocean under its icy surface, however – it may have lakes closer to the surface as well, which ups the possibility that life in some form could exist on Europa, whether it’s in the lakes or the world-spanning oceans.

But how do lakes, not to mention a massive ocean, exist on a planet that is roughly 485,000,000 miles away from the Sun? As it turns out, Europa has an extremely active core thanks to its close proximity to Jupiter. Jupiter’s constant tugging on Europa kicks the moon’s core into overdrive, which then heats the planet enough to be able to sustain liquid water.

The lakes, on the other hand, likely don’t stay in liquid from permanently. It’s believed that the lakes freeze and unfreeze over the course of several hundred, if not several thousand, years due to periodic transfers of energy from the moon’s core to the surface.

Source: Nature

[Image credit: NASA/Ted Stryk]

Jupiter’s moon Europa may have lakes in addition to oceans is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Leonid Meteor Shower is set to make its annual appearance later this week, and is expected to be most visible in the eastern sky during the predawn hours of Friday. Those who get lucky may see upto 20 visible shooting stars per hour.

However, the moon could yet obstruct meteor watching by lighting up the night sky in many locations, to the point at which the meteors become invisible. Ben Burress, staff astronomer at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California, explains:

“The quarter-phase moon will interfere with meteor watching this year. But since [the moon] won’t rise until after local midnight, and meteors can be seen in the earlier hours as well, there is a spell of time in the evening of the 17th when the sky will be moonless and darker, making for good conditions for viewing.”

The Leonid Shower occurs when the earth crosses paths with a trail of debris left in the wake of a comet, the 1.2-mile-wide (2-kilometer-wide) comet Tempel-Tuttle, which itself orbits the sun.

The icy Tempel-Tuttle comet gets closer to the sun every 33 years, and its partial melting causes pieces of dust, many no larger than a grain of sand, to get caught up along the comet’s orbit. These condense and form clouds of particles.

Each year, the earth crosses paths with these particle clouds, many of which burn up in our atmosphere and create fleeting shooting stars or meteors. On occasion, a larger piece of debris – the size of a pebble or even bigger – will produce a slower moving fireball with comparatively long-lasting smoke trails.

If you do want to try and catch the Leonids then, the very early hours of Friday will be your best bet. Pray for a clear sky, look eastwards, and let us know if you get to see the Leonids in action!

Leonid Meteor Shower to Peak During Predawn Friday is a post from: The Inquisitr

Jupiter may be our friendly big brother, protecting us from would-be catastrophes as wandering asteroids get caught up its gravitational pull, but it apparently isn’t so friendly to other planets. In fact, it may have even kicked a gas giant out of our solar system.

According to astronomer David Nesvorny from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, we may have had a 9th planet (or 10th, if you’re still holding onto Pluto as a planet), and a 5th gas giant, at one point in time.

Nesvorny came to the conclusion that there must have been another gas giant after computer simulations determined that our solar system being where it is now is extremely unlikely, 2.5% to be exact, without the influence of another gas giant to help put things in their place.

During the early formation of our solar system, Nesvorny believes that the solar system was far too violent, and by all rights Earth should have crashed into Mars or Venus, or even worse, Jupiter could have been pulled closer to home, wreaking unimaginable havoc along the way.

In fact, scientists believe that Jupiter was on a path towards the inner solar system at one point, but something tugged it back into its proper place. But when Jupiter got to where it should be, it interrupted the orbit of another gas giant and flung it off into space, never to be seen again.

Nesvorny speculates that our solar system’s lost planet could have been an icy gas giant, similar in size and composition to, say, Neptune or Uranus.

Source: Space.com, Southwest Research Institute

Our solar system may have had a fifth gas giant at one point is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Lutetia asteroid is a planet that never properly formed, according to new scientific research. ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft flew by the asteroid in July, collecting data that suggests Lutetia is what’s called a planetesimal, a body that never quite made it to full planethood.

Astronomers argue that the planet’s asteroid’s irregular shape has come about after billions of years of being pelted by other asteroids and comets. According to Holger Sierks of Germany’s Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung:

“We don’t think Lutetia was born looking like this. It was probably round when it formed.”

And Fabrizio Capaccioni of Italy’s INAF adds:

“It is striking that an object of this size can bear scars of events so different in age across its surface while not showing any sign of surface compositional variation.”

Further data unearthed by Rosetta suggests the planet has a molten metal heart. Beneath its scarred surface, Lutetia has one of the highest densities of any known asteroid, 3,400 kg per cubic metre. Researchers say this could be a sign the asteroid has a predominantly iron heart, though not necessarily a fully-formed core.

Lutetia, or 21 Lutetia to use its full name, was discovered in 1852, and is the second largest asteroid to have been visited by a spacecraft. The Rosetta probe passed it in July within 3,162 km (1,965 mi).

Rosetta has now left Lutetia far behind. It is currently in hibernation, waiting to begin its journey to a 2014 rendezvous with comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

Lutetia Asteroid Is Failed Planet With Metal Heart is a post from: The Inquisitr

In 2005, stargazing scientists discovered a previously unknown planet-like object, dubbed Eris, far off into the deepest reaches of our solar system in the Kuiper belt – even further away from us than Pluto. Its small size, then said to be marginally bigger than Pluto, caused some controversy in the scientific community, prompting Pluto’s famous demotion as a planet.

Now, studies have found that Eris isn’t actually that much different than Pluto. It’s smaller than originally thought, being just about the same size as Pluto is. Scientists previously thought of Eris as Pluto’s big sister, but now it looks like they’re icy twins.

Similar to Pluto, Eris orbits the sun in an “eccentric” orbit, meaning that it doesn’t circle around the sun in a circle, but rather more of an egg shape. At its furthest distance from the sun, Eris rests at around 9 billion miles away from the sun. In contrast, Pluto at its furthest distance is “only” 4.5 billion miles.

Also like Pluto, scientists believe that Eris has an off-and-on atmosphere. At its furthest point it’s too cold for an atmosphere to exist, but as it inches closer – at its closest, it gets within 3.4 billion miles from the sun – it’s believed that the atmosphere temporarily rises from the surface before freezing again as Eris gets further from the sun.

Another common trait between the two dwarf planets is that when their atmosphere freezes and falls to the surface, the planets get significantly brighter. Eris’ atmosphere is believed to be rich in methane, making it that much brighter at its furthest points from the sun when the atmosphere freezes and falls back to the surface.

via National Geographic

[Image: Illustration of Pluto by L. Calçada, ESO]

Pluto’s twin is colder, more distant is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Orionids are an annual phenomenon that occur every October, though visibility for this year’s shower is not expected to be clear. A large crescent moon will illuminate the night sky on Friday and Saturday, whereas a dark sky is best for watching meteor showers (living in a lit-up city will only hinder your chances).

This sums up a frustrating twelve months for (U.S.-based) meteor watchers. The LA Times notes how a full moon spoiled the view of the Perseids in August, and the Draconids from early-October peaked during daylight hours across North America.

And apparently, the Leonids meteor shower in November will be a similar washout. Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office, told The Times:

“The moon has just decided to wash out the meteor storms this year. They are a subtle phenomena and you really need a dark sky. A bright moon nearby really ruins the show. It’s not going to knock your socks off this year, but if you are out in the desert or up in the mountains, it is certainly worth a look.”

The Orionid meteor shower consists of dust particles, each roughly the size of a single sand grain, entering the Earth’s atmosphere and exciting the air molecules around them. This reaction gives off light. The shower is named the Orionids because it looks as though it circles the Orion constellation.

So, anyone getting up early at the weekend to catch the show?

The 2011 Orionid Meteor Shower: Coming To A Sky Near You (Maybe) is a post from: The Inquisitr

A new satellite from NASA has been pencilled in for an October 27th launch, and will be the first dedicated to observing key aspects of both Earth’s climate and its weather

The catchily-named National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project (NPP) has two aims: to harvest data that will enhance short-term weather forecasts and to help develop an understanding of climate change.

The NPP satellite comes equipped with five science instruments, including four new state-of-the-art sensors. Scientists hope it will extend more than 30 key data records that have been stored for decades by a group of Earth-observing satellites. Such data would help to predict changes in global climate.

Jim Gleason, NPP project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said:

“NPP’s observations of a wide range of interconnected Earth properties and processes will give us the big picture of how our planet changes. That will help us improve our computer models that predict future environmental conditions. Better predictions will let us make better decisions, whether it is as simple as taking an umbrella to work today or as complex as responding to a changing climate.”

Meteorologists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will soon be able to incorporate NPP data into their weather prediction models to produce forecasts and warnings that will help emergency responders anticipate, monitor and react to natural disasters.

The NPP will be blasted into its orbit by a Delta II rocket. Approximately the size of a minivan, it will orbit Earth 512 miles (824 kilometers) above the planet’s surface and will orbit Earth’s poles roughly 14 times a day.

NPP is set to launch from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on October 27.

NASA’s New Satellite to Monitor Earth’s Weather and Climate is a post from: The Inquisitr