JUNO - Juppin Jupiter

I always love it when we send probes to faraway places which look like stars in the sky.  As a child, it  was the first star with a simple telescope I looked at. Seeing the moons really excited me.

'Welcome to Jupiter!' NASA's Juno space probe arrives at giant planet

Jet Propulsion Lab, California (CNN)NASA says it has received a signal from 540 million miles across the solar system, confirming its Juno spacecraft has successfully started orbiting Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.

"Welcome to Jupiter!" flashed on screens at mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.

The Juno team cheered and hugged.

"This is phenomenal," said Geoff Yoder, acting administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

The probe had to conduct a tricky maneuver to slow down enough to allow it to be pulled into orbit: It fired its main engine for 35 minutes, effectively hitting the brakes to slow the spacecraft by about 1,212 miles per hour (542 meters per second).

"NASA did it again," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator.

On board NASA's flying lab

"We're there, we're in orbit. We conquered Jupiter."

"Through tones Juno sang to us and it was a song of perfection," said Rick Nybakken, Juno Project Manager, referring to the audio signal the probe sent to indicate it was in orbit.

The probe had to conduct a tricky maneuver to slow down enough to allow it to be pulled into orbit: It fired its main engine for 35 minutes, effectively hitting the brakes to slow the spacecraft by about 1,212 miles per hour (542 meters per second).

"NASA did it again," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator.

On board NASA's flying lab

"We're there, we're in orbit. We conquered Jupiter."

"Through tones Juno sang to us and it was a song of perfection," said Rick Nybakken, Juno Project Manager, referring to the audio signal the probe sent to indicate it was in orbit.

CNN

Cargo Ship - International Space Station

I already wrote about how Russia decided to charge an arm and a leg for us to send supplies to the International Space Station. 

In the form of capitalist pigs, the cavalry has arrived. One thing I find interesting in the story is it is a multinational effort.

Orbital's Cygnus space freighter embarks on maiden voyage

The new Cygnus commercial cargo ship has launched on a demonstration voyage to the International Space Station.

Built by Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC), the robotic vessel lifted off atop an Antares

rocket from the Wallops spaceport in Virginia, US.

Cygnus is one of two private systems seeded by Nasa to meet America's ISS re-supply requirements following the retirement of the space shuttles.

A successful mission will see OSC begin a series of operational cargo flights.

Nasa has awarded the company a $1.9bn (£1.2bn) contract covering eight sorties to the station.

Lift-off occurred at 10:58 local time (14:58 GMT).

The two-stage Antares appeared to work flawlessly. Its aim was to put the freighter in an orbit more than 240km above the Earth.

Cygnus will have to use its own thrusters over the course of the next four days to raise its altitude and chase down the space station.

FULL STORY - BBC NEWS

S

Sun, Magnetic Reversal

This is an interesting phenomenon, the periodic reversal of the Sun's magnetic field. It doesn't affect us here on Earth, but if we had that happen here all heck would break loose.

Nothing for us regular folk to see, but to some of us it is an interesting fact of our Solar System.

Sun will flip its magnetic field soon

The sun is gearing up for a major solar flip, NASA says.

In an event that occurs once every 11 years, the magnetic field of the sun will change its polarity in a matter of months, according new observations by NASA-supported observatories.

The flipping of the sun's magnetic field marks the peak of the star's 11-year solar cycle and the halfway point in the sun's "solar maximum" — the peak of its solar weather cycle. NASA released a new video describing the sun's magnetic flip



"It looks like we're no more than three to four months away from a complete field reversal," Todd Hoeksema, the director of Stanford University's Wilcox Solar Observatory, said in a statement. "This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system.
FULL STORY - Fox News

Who would have thought?

The U.S. spends hundreds of billions of dollars to help build the Space Station. Then we scrap or Space Shuttles and become dependent on Russia to transport our astronauts who then charge us a arm and leg.

Space Station

 Russia will charge the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)  $71

million to transport just one American astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard its Soyuz spacecraft in 2016.

That’s more than triple the $22 million per seat the Russians charged in 2006, according to a July 8 audit report by NASA’s inspector general. (See NASA IG-13-019.pd)

NASA spent $60 billion of U.S. taxpayer dollars to help build the ISS and that figure would increase to $100 billion if the cost of using space shuttles to assemble the ISS was factored in, the IG report noted.

NASA still contributes $3 billion annually to cover the space station’s operating costs, and signed an agreement to provide the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space an additional $15 million annually “to manage non-NASA research on the ISS.”

But NASA has little choice but to pay Russia's inflated ticket prices. Ever since August 2011, when the U.S. space agency mothballed its 30-year-old space shuttle program, NASA has had no way of getting American astronauts to the space station. The Russian Soyuz is now “the only vehicle capable of transporting crew to the ISS,” the IG report noted. 

FULL STORY - CNS News

Looks like time for private companies like to pick up the slack.

List of private spaceflight companies

No Solar Storm ! ?

Maybe the worry warts who believe they can control Earth's weather can put their minds together and do something for the Sun. I find anything to do with our Sun fascinating.

The calm before the solar storm? NASA warns 'something unexpected is happening to the Sun' 

2013 was due to be year of the 'solar maximum'

• As this picture shows, in fact the sun is incredibly calm - baffling experts

Something unexpected' is happening on the Sun, Nasa has warned. 

This year was supposed to be the year of 'solar maximum,' the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle. 

But as this image reveals, solar activity is relatively low.

'Sunspot numbers are well below their values from 2011, and strong solar flares have been infrequent,' the space agency says.

The image above shows the Earth-facing surface of the Sun on February 28, 2013, as observed by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

It observed just a few small sunspots on an otherwise clean face, which is usually riddled with many spots during peak solar activity.

Experts have been baffled by the apparent lack of activity - with many wondering if NASA simply got it wrong.

However, Solar physicist Dean Pesnell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center believes he has a different explanation.

'This is solar maximum,' he says. 

'But it looks different from what we expected because it is double-peaked.'

'The last two solar maxima, around 1989 and 2001, had not one but two peaks.' 

Solar activity went up, dipped, then rose again, performing a mini-cycle that lasted about two years, he said.

full story, Mail Online

Spacecraft Voyager near edge of Solar System

This is quite amazing, the journey of the two spacecrafts, Voyagers I & II.
Thirty five year ago launched to explore the planets within our Solar System not only continues to travel further away, amazingly is still sending back new information to earth close to leaving the Solar System altogether.

NASA Voyager 1 spacecraft nears interstellar space
NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has encountered a new environment more than 11 billion miles from Earth, suggesting that the venerable probe is on the cusp of leaving the solar system.

CLICK TO VIEW ENLARGE PICTURE

The Voyager 1 probe has entered a region of space with a markedly higher flow of charged particles from beyond our solar system, researchers said. Mission scientists suspect this increased flow indicates that the spacecraft — currently 11.1 billion miles (17.8 billion kilometers) from its home planet — may be poised to cross the boundary into interstellar space.


"The laws of physics say that someday Voyager will become the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, but we still do not know exactly when that someday will be," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, in a statement.


"The latest data indicate that we are clearly in a new region where things are changing more quickly," Stone added. "It is very exciting. We are approaching the solar system's frontier."

FULL STORY

The link is well worth a visit.