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Advertisement Advertisement. Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. Others Others. Both of those models of conservation were built around hunting. Rosie Cooney, a zoologist, on trophy hunting and conservation following the controversy over the killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe. The colors do not even line up right.
The Deep Space Climate Observatory, the spacecraft to which the pictures were credited, is located at the L1 Lagrangian Point, a fancy name for the point in space nearly a million miles away where the gravitational pull of the sun and of the Earth essentially cancel out. But that would mean the sun was directly behind the spacecraft, and the shadow of the moon should have crossed Earth as it passed in front. But there's no shadow — and such lighting incongruities are usually the smoking gun of manipulated images.
Those convinced that NASA has been faking pictures since might see this as just another example. The spacecraft, called Dscovr for short, is not exactly at L1, but instead circles around it. That makes sense, because there are four spacecraft at L1, and one would not want them to smash into one another. Adam Szabo, the NASA scientist in charge of Dscovr's Earth-facing camera, said via email, "As the small sliver of shadow at the right edge of the moon shows, Dscovr is about 5 degrees away from the sun-Earth line.
Thus, when the moon is between Dscovr and Earth, it is not exactly between the sun and Earth, so no eclipse. But imagine the amazing images Dscovr will capture during the next partial solar eclipse, on Sept.
NASA explains that the mismatched colors are because of the movement of the moon. Each color image is a composite of three black-and-white pictures taken through three different color filters about 30 seconds apart, which is why you see a thin arc of green at the right side of the moon.
By the way, the side of the moon seen in the animation is the far side, not the dark side. It is facing the sun, so therefore it would be bright — daytime, just like on the surface of the Earth. Just as on Earth, half of the moon is always in darkness — nighttime, in other words — but the far side is not continually dark. But the March total eclipse could be a cool sight indeed. Cole said. The moon itself may also be in the field of view. If the planet were rid of all mosquitoes, would there be any negative environmental consequences?
It is impossible to know for sure, because so many varieties of mosquitoes fill so many environmental niches, feeding on and being fed on by such a variety of other creatures, and because many of these interactions have not been studied. But it is only natural that people, pestered by itchy bites and bearing the brunt of mosquito-borne diseases, would hope the answer is no.
Many birds, bats, amphibians, fish, spiders and other insects feed on mosquitoes, but many mosquito-control specialists say they usually do not eat enough mosquitoes to control them, let alone to make the loss of mosquitoes crucial to whether the predators survive.
Send your questions to C. Claiborne Ray at questions nytimes. Questions of general interest will be answered, but requests for medical advice cannot be honored and unpublished letters cannot be answered individually. Lindgren's response to the taste? According to NASA, sustainable agricultural techniques like this may one day be used to feed astronauts on a trip to Mars. Imagine you start eating and you see the wine in your glass going left to right. Silvian Marcus, a director of building structures for WSP, on technology used to keep skinny skyscrapers from swaying.
This week archaeologists, wildlife ecologists and other scientists on Twitter shared embarrassing moments from their field research using the hashtag FieldWorkFail.
Among the confessions were tales of elephants crushing trap cameras, paleontologists accidentally swallowing fossils, and one case where a researcher unintentionally glued herself to a crocodile.
Not all fieldwork mistakes are as amusing, but even the unfunny ones can be fortuitous. Jared had been studying tree frogs in the cactus and thorn forests of northeastern Brazil for decades. But on one particular day he wanted to get his hands on Corythomantis greeningi, a frog with a helmet-shaped head covered in tiny spines. Jared said in an email. Later he felt a sharp pain radiating through his arm, which he described as being far worse than the worst wasp sting imaginable.
Jared was at least four hours away from any hospital, so he decided to tough it out in the desert. Five hours later, the excruciating pain subsided on its own. When the frog head-butted him, it envenomed him too. Researchers already knew that the frog secretes toxins from its skin, but the poisoned spines on the head had not been documented before. Jared and his colleagues found that the same spiny and bony head occurs in another frog species, Aparasphenodon brunoi, which lives in the Atlantic rain forests of South America.
They decided to test how toxic the two frogs were in the lab by injecting the poisons into rodents. To their surprise, they found that in mice, A. Jared, were twice as lethal. Although Dr. Jared did not tweet his fieldwork faux pas, he did mention it along with his findings in a paper published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. This is the first time anyone has suggested that a frog can be venomous, according to Edmund Brodie , a biologist from Utah State University and co-author on the paper.
But to be classified as venomous, a creature must have a method by which it can inflict that poison into a victim. For these two frogs, flailing the head suffices. Brodie said. A gigantic glowing bubble in the constellation Hydra is actually a planetary nebula, a gas cloud formed from a dying star. The orb has a diameter of almost four light-years.
A planetary nebula lasts tens of thousands of years and then fades, leaving behind a stellar remnant that persists for about a billion years. The remnant then becomes a hot, dense white dwarf that cools over billions of years. An earlier version of this post misstated part of the name of the organization that runs the telescope. The radioactive element plutonium gets its name from Pluto. So it is only fitting that a variation of the unstable metal, known as plutonium , would be at the heart of the New Horizons mission that flew past the former ninth planet last month.
This isotope releases energy in the form of heat as it decays. New Horizons transforms the heat energy into electricity capable of powering its voyage through the solar system. By now, New Horizons has gone about 15 million miles beyond Pluto, and is steadily beaming data from the flyby back to Earth. The energy conversion takes place in the craft's pound generator, called the General Purpose Heat Source-Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator.
New Horizons was stocked with 24 pounds of plutonium that produced about watts of electricity when it left Earth in , according to Ryan Bechtel, an engineer from the Department of Energy who works on space nuclear power.
During the Pluto flyby the battery produced watts, Mr. Bechtel said. The power will continue to decrease as the metal decays, but there is enough of it to command the probe for another 20 years, according to Curt Niebur, a NASA program scientist on the New Horizons mission.
In that time the spacecraft will have traveled 5. Its plutonium heart will beat softer with every mile, until it decreases to the point where there is no longer enough to support the systems that operate the spacecraft and communicate with Earth, according to Dr.
When that happens, the craft will continue combing through the cosmos at the same speed and in the same direction until something stops it, Dr. Niebur said. But if nothing in the vast emptiness of space impedes New Horizons' travels, then "it will just keep going, forever, all alone in the deep dark," he said. Thanks to pirates and whalers eating them and to non-native species like goats destroying their habitat, four of the 14 documented species are extinct.
Most recently, the Pinta species vanished with the death of Lonesome George , after decades of attempts to get him to reproduce. But the tortoises emerging from the crates above represent a milestone in tortoise restoration efforts.
They are among tortoises recently released onto Santa Fe Island , which lost its tortoise species a century and a half ago. By the s, the island was so sparsely populated that its 12 females and two males never even crossed paths to mate.
Cayot said. The other two males stepped up too. The tortoise eggs were incubated, at temperatures adjusted to hatch two females for every male slightly warmer eggs produce females. Santa Fe was next. The 30 oldest, including two pictured above, have radio transmitters glued to their carapaces. Periodically, conservationists will find those tortoises to study their movement and effects on vegetation, Dr. Cayot said, noting that about half of repatriated tortoises die because of scarcity of food and water.
Those who find what they need are likely to live a century or more. But without our traditional foods, we die as a culture. Vi Waghiyi, who lives on St.
Lawrence Island in a remote part of Alaska, home to one of the biggest and most polluted U. That was pretty glorious right? Go back and watch it again. Scientists think the vents and the life around them may offer some clues to how and where life on Earth started. Underwater, the vents look like bubbling chimneys. Normal pH of the ocean is around 8. Normally these conditions would make it difficult for sealife, but what is so unusual, Dr.
Lebrato said, is that the area around the vents is full of crabs and corals. Lebrato said the scientists want to know what biological traits allow the organisms to survive. See a video you want explained? Let us know at summerofscience nytimes. Joost van Hoof, a building physicist at Fontys University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, commenting on a study of office buildings and the gender-biased formula used to set their temperatures.
I had always thought of this as a half moon. If it is a quarter moon, is there such a thing as a half moon? The half-illuminated disk of the moon that we see and often refer to informally as a half moon is a quarter of the way along its journey in time from new moon dark to crescent moon to full moon fully illuminated and back again.
For that reason, modern astronomers refer to this phase as the first-quarter moon. The sides are reversed when viewed from the Southern Hemisphere. But to confuse matters further, such older sources were often referring to the crescent moon, either waxing or waning. In reality, of course, exactly half the surface of the moon is illuminated by the sun at all times. What waxes and wanes is not the moon itself but the part of the illuminated side that can be seen by observers on Earth, owing to the changing angles formed by the sun, Earth and the moon.
This is no Seurat. Scientists at NYU Langone Medical Center have genetically altered basic yeast and created these images in living color. This is a live yeast portrait of Gregor Mendel, far right, the ultimate nod to the father of modern genetics. For centuries, humans have played around with yeast. In ancient days, we domesticated it to make beer and bread. This artwork is just a way to visualize the next frontier of yeast manipulation. A few years ago, the geneticist Dr. The goal of the effort, called Synthetic Yeast 2.
Boeke said. To get orange and yellow, they altered genes to pump out beta carotene, the pigment found in carrots. To create the images you see here, a robot picked up tiny droplets of color-producing yeast strains and used sound waves to blast them upward into preprogrammed cells on an agar growth plate.
The scientists then incubated the plate, and the colors got stronger as the yeast grew. The lab can make 10 colors in all, and Dr.
Boeke challenges every new member of his lab to add a color to the palette. Boeke said he was interested in developing yeast strains that could communicate and signal color changes, say from red to pink, when in proximity to one another.
On July 12, researchers aboard a ship called the Northern Song spotted a humpback whale lunge feeding and enjoying some krill in Frederick Sound, Alaska. It was no ordinary sighting, and the scientists were ecstatic: They say the observation is only the most recent in the longest string of sightings of any humpback in the world. The whale, whom the researchers named Old Timer, was first seen in Lynn Canal in southeast Alaska 44 years ago by Charles Jurasz, a pioneer in whale research.
Old Timer was already fully grown. He is believed to be at least 50 years old now. It lifted its tail flukes, and we saw the underside. In , Old Timer was spotted off the coast of Hawaii escorting a mother-calf pair. He was observed again in , defending his position next to a lone female from other competing males.
That sighting confirmed he was male, Dr. Pack said. Peter J. But on Saturday night, that light show was upstaged by another kind of display: projections of images of endangered species lower down on the iconic midtown office tower. To make their statement, the artists used 40 projectors on the roof of another building a few blocks south. And whether the project succeeded in expanding awareness of threats to the planet's biodiversity, it made an impression on some of the people who gazed upon it firsthand.
Can you spot the drowning child in the image here? A person who is drowning is physiologically incapable of calling out or waving for help — meaning often there is little noise or splash.
In his marine safety guide Mario Vittone, a Coast Guard veteran, describes some things to look for instead:. The videos that Mr. In this photo, a bacterial colony rests atop a gridded surface.
That gridded surface is: A. A bacterial sieve that separates bigger pathogens from smaller ones. A type of camera for deriving images from certain varieties of molecules. A microbial grater used to thinly slice samples for observation under a microscope. A coordinate plane to track the location of individual bacteria. An excerpt from a chat with Xiaoice , a popular Microsoft chatbot that mines the Chinese Internet to make conversation with people.
The outcry over the killing of Cecil the lion suggests a strategy for saving the many other lions that are threatened by hunters. What if they too had names? All of them. People have been killing a lot of lions for a long time. How many? In a major report in , the International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimated that hunting tourists killed , animals per year. That included 3, buffalo, leopards, elephants and lions — more than 2 percent of the lion population.
But for them the world is a reverse "Cheers. The death of Cecil — dark-maned, living in a park, studied by scientists and known to tourists — was greeted as tragic. It was illegal to kill him, which no doubt accounts for some of the uproar. And he certainly looked appealing in photos. But you can't underestimate the importance of a name. When you name another creature, you assign it a certain status.
You might name a pet pig, but probably not one destined for bacon. There are about 20, lions left in Africa according to Panthera , a conservation group. Imagine if they all had names. Pessimists may object that it's hard to name 20, animals, but we have computers. If you don't think this will work, here's a test.
Say the following two sentences out loud and see which one makes your eyes mist. Once every two or three years, a blue moon will grace our sky. You might say its specialness is simply that it is extra. The popular definition is that it is the second full moon in a calendar month.
A truly blue-colored moon can result following a dust storm or volcanic eruption when super tiny dust particles refract blue light. Full moon fun fact, blue or not: researchers have found that some doodlebugs dig deeper holes to catch prey during this time in the lunar cycle. Graphene is a thin material with tremendous potential. Measuring only an atom-thick, it is harder than diamond, a better electrical conductor than copper, and times as strong as steel.
Graphene is so strong that a sheet of it stretched across a coffee-cup should be able to support the weight of a truck bearing down on a pencil point. Now researchers have discovered another one of graphene's feats: It's as flexible as paper. Not only can graphene be crumpled and then perfectly flattened, but it can also be folded like origami, according to a report published Wednesday in Nature.
Using a style of origami that involves cuts and folds called kirigami , the researchers fashioned a sheet of graphene into a tiny spring. According to Nature , researchers may one day use kirigami to craft graphene sheets into microscopic weighing scales or nets small enough to wrap around living cells.
Don Catlin, an expert on testing for banned substances, on two cyclists' positive drug tests suggesting use of an experimental drug not yet been approved for human consumption. Here is the other side, with Africa front and center. For almost a century, the Saltwater Cowboys of the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Department have been wrangling up wild ponies and sending them on a 4-minute swim across the Chincoteague Channel, just off the coast of Virginia.
The last Wednesday and Thursday of July are the days that the ponies paddle 75 yards to the other side of the water on Wednesday before parading through town to be auctioned off on Thursday. Some locals call the ponies wild, but they are actually feral, meaning at one point they escaped domestication. The most popular origin story is that the Chincoteague ponies survived a 17th Century Spanish shipwreck.
With little evidence to support that popular tale, however, a more plausible one is that settlers kept ponies on the island to avoid a horse tax. Over their year history, these island mutts have demonstrated a keen ability to stick around. They survive on marsh grasses and poison ivy — whatever they can get their snouts on.
With no apex predators, the two herds on the island would be a problem if not managed. Grazing ponies would disrupt fiddler crab activity and take food and nesting habitat from other animals like deer and marsh birds, according to Kelly Taylor, science communicator at Assateague Island National Seashore. Along with being a good way to raise funds for the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Department, the auction of their private herd on the Virginia side of the island reduces the population and protects the environment.
Only the Virginia ponies take part in the swim. Correction: July 30, An earlier version of this post misstated the day the ponies swim each year. While it occurred on the last Wednesday of July this year, if July 31 is a Wednesday, the swim occurs the week before.
When we planned our family vacation this year, we had one thing in mind: puffins. She got a puffin tattooed on her hip when she was in college, and had found out about a boat trip that takes visitors to Machias Seal Island, home to the largest colony of puffins along the Maine coast.
Between May and August the seabirds nest, laying a single egg per mother, and near the end of the season the little pufflings come out of their burrows to begin their own migratory lives. Upon arriving on the acre island, we headed to a small blind. The puffins come within a few feet of the small gray structures — and cluster by the dozens up on top. We were warned not stick our hands out the window or to do anything else that would remind the puffins of our presence.
Too much exposure to humans, our guides said, agitates them. The adult puffins seemed oblivious to us as they toddled around, knocking into each other on their crowded rocks and darting down into the burrows with beaks laden with fish for their hungry young.
The little pufflings emerge from their cozy dwellings and generally begin their seafaring life in August. You can see what they are up to down there, on another island, via the Audubon Society burrow cam. On the way back from the island, my daughter showed her tattoo to our fellow passengers and crew.
They found the depicted bird exquisitely detailed, and stood up well to the real thing. They expressed this, largely, by saying, "Whoa! A number of operators offer a glimpse of puffins from a boat. You can find out more about efforts to restore puffins to Maine's coastal islands here. About 15 to 20 million years ago this lizard, an anole, was trapped in tree resin that later turned to amber on the island of Hispaniola.
Anoles still live in abundance on the island and throughout the Caribbean, and Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, was interested in understanding how their communities have changed over the years. To do this, he gathered almost every known anole fossil from this time and place, with the help of colleagues and collectors around the world who prize examples of life caught in resin as both gems and fossils.
After analyzing the 20 best preserved examples, he found that not only are the lizards much the same now as they were then — no surprise — but so is the way the anoles divide their rain forest home. The nature of their ecological community has remained unchanged. Anoles occupy very specific bits of space on trees in the rain forest, and their body shape tells their niche. The anole pictured here has the long, narrow head and short limbs of trunk-to crown anoles.
They live now on the trunks of trees above about six feet up to the crown. Other anoles live in the crown; and yet others live on the trunk, but closer to the ground.
Scientists are skeptical that these kind of ecological divisions last over great stretches of time. But this is one case in which they did. By 20 million years ago, Dr. Losos said, the anoles had already evolved the body shapes that show how they shared their world. And since the shapes have stayed the same all that time, he concludes, so has the shape of their community. Trunk-to-crown, ground-to-trunk — they have occupied the same niches for all these millions of years.
One unsolved mystery about this particular anole is that while its whole body was preserved, its internal organs and skeleton seem to have rotted away and disappeared. Rest your head and you could miss an echinopsis flower. Some varieties bloom and wilt in just a few hours. So Greg Krehel — who owns more than different varieties and hybrids of echinopsis, a kind of cactus — decided to do something to capture these short, vibrant lives.
Krehel, a software start-up consultant, started with still images. Time-lapses, he decided, would better highlight the speed at which the flowers change. Now he condenses the time it takes for the petals to open — often under 10 hours, and rarely more than a day — into just a few vibrant seconds of video, which he posts on Instagram.
Krehel, a longtime cactuses lover, was introduced to echinopsis about five years ago when a cactus he picked up at a garden shop started blooming — and blooming. At his home in Jacksonville, Fla. Krehel now has a collection of about plants acquired from sellers across the United States.
Echinopsis are fairly easy to grow, he said. In Jacksonville, they live in pots. Krehel said he has learned how to tell when one of his plants is ready to bloom, watching as the growth rate of the flowers speeds up. When the time comes, he brings his subject into a makeshift studio — a bathroom equipped with a photo tent — and sets up to shoot 80 frames an hour over the course of a night. The resulting videos show the flower as it explodes into a vibrant bloom — and sometimes go on to depict the wilting process.
At the end of the night, he returns the plant to its home outside and waits for another bloom to appear. The length of the blooming season varies, he said, but in Florida it starts in April and ends in October. For echinopsis, beauty comes with age. While there are differences among hybrids, in general the older plants bloom more often and show off more flowers — sometimes as many as 30 in a single season. Sara J. Ash, a professor of ecology and conservation biology at the University of the Cumberlands, on a study of cat owners and how they perceive their pets' effects on wildlife.
This came amid a summer when seven swimmers were bitten by sharks in North Carolina in a single month. Even clouds shaped like sharks are considered to be terrifying.
As an antidote to panicky associations with the toothy creatures, we offer the six-inch pocket shark. Using a CT scanner, Dr. Maisey and researchers from the museum imaged this beady-eyed oddity. Since only two pocket shark specimens have ever been collected, researchers resist investigating its insides with invasive tools like scalpels. One reason the pocket shark is a rare find is that it lives in moderately deep water, too far down for divers but not deep enough to be spotted with tools that observe the ocean floor.
But what is most curious about the pocket shark, according to Dr. No other shark has these structures. Scientists are not sure exactly what the pockets are meant for, and some guess they might release glow-in-the-dark fluids for catching prey or a mate.
Because so few of the sharks have been found, it may take scientists a while to solve the mystery. But according to Dr. A student of Terry Tao , a mathematician who is regarded by many as the finest of his generation. They're blind and fat and they are insatiable. They will eat anything — guano, black worms, dead and decaying fish — and they will keep eating until all the food is gone.
Unlike other fish, which eventually get full, these fat fish just keep going. They are Mexican cavefish, which adapted to living in the dark by losing their eyes — no need to see — and adapted to living in a place where food is only available twice a year when the river floods by getting as fat as possible. They also have a slow metabolism so they keep the fat on. They are weird fish, for sure, but what makes them especially interesting is what they might reveal about human obesity.
They have a mutation in melanocortin 4, a receptor gene also known as MC4R that also makes people grow fat , reports Clifford Tabin of Harvard and his colleagues in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. About 6 percent of very obese children have an MC4R mutation. About 1 in 1, Caucasians have an MC4R mutation, making the syndrome as prevalent as cystic fibrosis. It is the most common single gene cause of obesity, and one of the most common genetic disorders in humans.
Like the fish, many obese people with an MC4R mutation have huge appetites starting in the first year of life. They cannot help getting fat — their craving for food and their lack of satiety overwhelm any attempts to diet. But unlike people with the MC4R mutation, the fish are healthy. They have enormous fatty livers, but no liver disease.
When they eat, their sugar levels shoot up and stay so high you would swear they are diabetic. Yet they are not. Fish, like humans, have insulin receptors and can become diabetic. Those fish, Dr. Tabin says, must have other mutations that allow them to avoid the consequences of obesity. If researchers could identify these genes, it might be possible to mimic their effects with drugs.
So, he says, although it may not be possible to eliminate human obesity, at least in the foreseeable future, the fish could lead to ways to help overweight people stay healthier, even if they cannot lose weight. Erison Turay, a survivor of Ebola, on why he started a soccer club for other Ebola survivors in Sierra Leone.
Update: We've heard from some readers who thought that the first updated "Blue Marble" photo was of the same region of the planet as the image. That's not the case. The Apollo 17 crew took a photo, left, which extends from the Mediterranean Sea area to the Antarctica south polar ice cap.
There is heavy cloud cover in the Southern Hemisphere, while the coastline of Africa is visible. The Asian mainland is on the horizon toward the northeast. The image taken on July 6, , center, was of the other side of the planet and North and Central America are most clear.
On July 29, a third "Blue Marble" image, right, was released that shows Africa front and center. Central Europe is toward the top of the image with the Sahara Desert to the south. He explained what makes these images so special. Along with the challenge of getting far enough away to get the entire Earth into a single frame, there is the matter of lighting. Consequently many of the images of Earth we see are actually composites. This is just the first in a series of images of Earth that will be sent back from a million miles away.
We will soon see the other side, fully illuminated as well. Update: you can find the other side here. Jerrold T. Bushberg, a medical physicist and a professor of radiology and radiation oncology at the University of California, Davis on the risks of radiation emitted by cellphones. A Berkeley, Calif.
This photo shows an stockpile of elephant and rhino tusks that have been seized by the Kenyan government. Scientists gathered data about the collection at Kenya Wildlife Services headquarters in Nairobi on Tuesday. More than two decades after a ban on ivory trade, Asian demand still fuels illegal poaching of elephants and rhinos in Kenya.
The Kenyan government has said that it wants the world to see these animals for their beauty rather than economic gain. It should always be happening in the background. This is the biggest question. We should be listening. Forty six years ago, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. Mueller, a NASA official. Mueller attempted to forecast the next decade of American missions to space. Some of what the NASA official proposed - an orbital space station serving as a laboratory and reusable shuttles - eventually came to pass.
But much of what he hoped for did not occur:. The essay described the advantages of a nuclear-powered base on the moon that would create a breathable atmosphere and house explorers. A couple of months ago, humanity did succeed in sending an espresso maker to the International Space Station.
But we've yet to build an extra-terrestrial base. Mueller proposed spacecraft with nuclear-fueled engines that would remain in orbit and transfer personnel from a station orbiting Earth to one that would orbit the moon, and then to the moon itself. As the recent Pluto mission has demonstrated, securing enough nuclear fuel for a piano-size spacecraft is still a challenge. The essay concluded: "By the end of this decade the moon could be, and I believe will be, regularly visited.
The Cuban hutia, a button-nosed, furry rodent the size of a dachshund, is said to be shy by nature. They greeted us when our skiff reached the beach, and were happy to stick around for a drink. While some might see them as oversized rats, these hutias were pretty cute. It lives on plants, fruit and the occasional small reptile, but has a special fondness for mangrove roots. It is illegal to hunt hutias in Cuba without a special permit, but occasionally they end up in stew.
Legend has it that the rodent provided the first meat Christopher Columbus tasted in the New World. At first glance, it's a picture of Earth. Not much different from all those pictures of Earth you've seen over the years. There are not many photographs showing a fully illuminated Earth, because the camera has to be between the Earth and sun, while far enough away to capture the whole planet. Weather satellites in geosynchronous orbit can get a similar view, but not quite the entire hemisphere.
Also, they are over a single location and the planet is partly in shadow most of the time. Now, the Deep Space Climate Observatory , or Dscovr for short, will be taking such photographs on a regular basis, always over the dayside of Earth. The first was released on Monday. The spacecraft started out as "Triana," a pet project of former Vice President Al Gore in who thought it would be inspirational and educational for a satellite to continually send back a view of a changing Earth from almost a million miles away.
Opponents derided it as "GoreSat," and the finished spacecraft was put in storage. It was resurrected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to look the other way, at the sun, to serve as a sentinel of oncoming solar storms. But the Earth-facing camera is still there and now is finally taking pictures. She died at age 56 on July Scientists had a lot riding on the New Horizons mission to Pluto.
Apart from the mythological connection for this name, Christy chose it because the first four letters also matched the name of his wife, Charlene. A 3D model of Pluto's largest moon, Charon.
The lives and accomplishments of both women aviation pioneers have now been honored with the naming of landmarks on Pluto. JPL's lucky peanuts are an unofficial tradition at big mission events. Full Moon Guide: October - November The rover will be delivered to the Moon's surface in late VIPER is the first resource-mapping mission on the surface of another celestial body. Full Moon Guide: September - October For the first time, astronomers have uncovered evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of Jupiter's moon Ganymede.
On April 17 New Horizons will reach a rare milepost — 50 astronomical units from the Sun or 50 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. A technique for scanning Mars rocks for microscopic fossils is also being developed to hunt for microbes on Enceladus, Titan, and Europa.
Phobos orbits through a stream of charged atoms and molecules that flow off the atmosphere of Mars, new research shows. Plumes of water vapor that may be venting into space from Jupiter's moon Europa could come from within the icy crust itself, according to new research.
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