"Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here's the Earth coming up. Wow is that pretty!"

Soon after that pronouncement, 50 years ago today, one of the most famous images ever taken was snapped from the orbit of the Moon.

Now known as "Earthrise", the iconic image shows the Earth rising above the limb of the Moon, as taken by the crew of Apollo 8. But the well-known Earthrise image was actually the second image taken of the Earth rising above the lunar limb -- it was just the first in color.

With modern digital technology, however, the real first Earthrise image -- originally in black and white -- has now been remastered to have the combined resolution and color of the first three images. Behold!

The featured image is a close-up of the picture that Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders was talking about. Thanks to modern technology and human ingenuity, now we can all see it.

(Historical note: A different historic black & white image of the Earth setting behind the lunar limb was taken by the robotic Lunar Orbiter 1 two years earlier.)

For the second time in human history, a object has reached the space in between the stars, interstellar Space. The NASA's Voyager 2 probe now has left the heliosphere - the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by our Sun.

Comparing data from different instruments aboard the trailblazing spacecraft, mission scientists determined the probe crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere on Nov. 5.

This boundary, called the heliopause, is where the tenuous, hot solar wind meets the cold, dense interstellar medium. Its twin, Voyager 1, crossed this boundary in 2012, but Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that will provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into interstellar space.

Voyager 2 now is slightly more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth. Mission operators still can communicate with Voyager 2 as it enters this new phase of its journey, but information - moving at the speed of light - takes about 16.5 hours to travel from the spacecraft to Earth. By comparison, light traveling from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.

The most compelling evidence of Voyager 2's exit from the heliosphere came from its onboard Plasma Science Experiment (PLS), an instrument that stopped working on Voyager 1 in 1980, long before that probe crossed the heliopause. Until recently, the space surrounding Voyager 2 was filled predominantly with plasma flowing out from our Sun. This outflow, called the solar wind, creates a bubble - the heliosphere - that envelopes the planets in our solar system. The PLS uses the electrical current of the plasma to detect the speed, density, temperature, pressure and flux of the solar wind. The PLS aboard Voyager 2 observed a steep decline in the speed of the solar wind particles on Nov. 5. Since that date, the plasma instrument has observed no solar wind flow in the environment around Voyager 2, which makes mission scientists confident the probe has left the heliosphere.

 

 

Follow the Link below to see realtime updates about the 2 Voyagers:

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

Scientists evaluating recent data from NASA's Voyager and Cassini spacecraft have determined that Voyager 1 could cross over into the frontier of interstellar space anytime and a lot earlier than previously thought. The conclusions are detailed in a June Issue of the journal Nature.

Details from Voyager's low-energy charged particle instruments, first reported in December 2010, now have revealed that the outward velocity of the charged particles flowing from the sun has slowed to zero. The stagnation of this solar wind has persisted through at least February 2011, marking a thick, previously unforeseen "transition zone" at the edge of our solar system.

"There is one time we are going to cross that frontier, and this is the first sign it is upon us," said Tom Krimigis, prinicipal researcher for Voyager's low-energy charged particle instrument and Cassini's magnetospheric imaging instrument, based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

Krimigis and colleagues combined the newest Voyager data with previously unpublished measurements from the ion and neutral camera on Cassini's magnetospheric imaging instrument. The Cassini instrument gathers data on neutral atoms surging into our solar system from the outside.

The research indicates that the boundary between interstellar space and the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself is likely between 10 and 14 billion miles (16 to 23 billion kilometers) from the sun, with a best estimate of approximately 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers). Considering that Voyager 1 is already nearly 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) out, it could cross into interstellar space at any moment.

"These calculations show we're getting close, but how close? That's what we don't know, but Voyager 1 speeds outward a billion miles just about every three years, so we may not have long to wait," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist, based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Scientists plan to keep studying the Voyager 1 data, searching for confirmation. They will also be studying the Voyager 2 data, but Voyager 2 isn't as close to the edge of the solar system as Voyager 1. Voyager 2 is about 9 billion miles (14 billion kilometers) away from the sun.

Launched in 1977, the Voyager twin spacecraft have been on a 33-year quest. They are humanity's farthest working deep space sentinels enroute to reach the edge of interstellar space. The Voyagers were originally built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which will continue to operate both spacecraft. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, subsidized by the Heliophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is managed for NASA by Caltech.

More information about Voyager is available at:  http://www.nasa.gov/voyager and  http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov.

The actual existence of a world with a double setting sun, as pictured in the film Star Wars more than thirty years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA's Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous discovery of a circumbinary planet -- a planet revolving around two stars -- 200 light-years from Earth.

As opposed to Star Wars’ Tatooine, the planet is very cold, gaseous and not believed to harbor life, however its discovery shows the diversity of planets in our universe. Previous studies have hinted at the existence of circumbinary planets, but clear evidence proved elusive. Kepler detected such a planet, known as Kepler-16b, by observing transits, when the brightness of a parent star dims from the planet crossing in front of it.

"This breakthrough discovery confirms a new class of planetary systems which could harbor life," Kepler principal researcher William Borucki said. "Given that many stars in our galaxy are part of a binary system, this means the possibilities for life are much greater than if planets form only around single stars. This  breakthrough discovery confirms a theory that scientists have had for many years but could not prove until now."

A research team led by Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., utilized data from the Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, to find transiting planets. Kepler is the first NASA mission able to find Earth-size planets in or near to the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid h2o (water) can can be found on the surface of the orbiting planet.

Scientists discovered the new planet in the Kepler-16 system, a pair of orbiting stars that eclipse each other from our vantage point on Earth. Whenever the smaller star partially obstructs the larger star, a primary eclipse takes place, and a secondary eclipse occurs when the smaller sized star is occulted, or totally blocked, by the larger star.

Astronomers further more noticed that the brightness of the system dropped even when the stars were not eclipsing each other, hinting at a 3rd body. The additional dimming in brightness events, called the tertiary and quaternary eclipses, reappeared at unpredictable intervals of time, indicating the stars were in different positions in their orbit each time the third body passed. This confirmed the third body was circling, not merely one, but both stars, in a wide circumbinary orbit.

The gravitational pull on the stars, measured by alterations in their eclipse times, was a good indicator of the mass of the 3rd body. Only a very minor gravitational pull was detected, one that only could be caused by a small mass. The actual findings are described in a new study released Friday, Sept. 16, in the journal Science.

"Most of what we know about the sizes of stars comes from such eclipsing binary systems, and most of what we know about the size of planets comes from transits," said Doyle, who also is the lead author and a Kepler participating scientist. "Kepler-16 brings together the very best of both worlds, with stellar eclipses and planetary transits in a single system."

This discovery shows that Kepler-16b is an unfriendly, cold world about the size of Saturn and believed to be made up of about 50 % rock and 50 % gas. The parent stars are smaller than our sun. One is 69 % the mass of the sun and the other only 20 %. Kepler-16b orbits around the two stars every 229 days, comparable to Venus’ 225-day orbit, but lies outside the system’s habitable region, where liquid water could exist on the surface, because the stars are cooler than our sun.

"Working in motion picture, we regularly are tasked with producing something never before seen," said visual effects manager John Knoll of Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., in San Francisco. "However, in many cases, scientific discoveries prove to be a lot more spectacular than anything we dare imagine. There's no question these discoveries influence and inspire storytellers. Their very existence serves as cause to dream even bigger and open our imagination to new possibilities beyond what we think we 'know.'

Four years after launch out of Cape Canaveral, NASA's ion-drive Dawn spacecraft is finally in orbit around the asteroid Vesta, checking out the second largest body within the rubble-strewn belt in between Mars and Jupiter in unmatched detail. Photos unveiled today show a unusually tortured world along with enormous parallel lines separating the intensely cratered northern hemisphere from clearer terrain in the south covered with the chaotic remains of a devastating impact.

"All these photographs have been already a fantastic revelation to the team about what the surface is like," Christopher Russell, the mission's primary investigator, told journalists today. "We did not imagine the detail we're seeing and the various processes that we're seeing evidence of now. These are really insightful into this kind of building block of the premature solar system...It's actually a stunning and exciting little world sitting there in the center of the asteroid belt that we're going to learn a great deal about."

NASA's Dawn spacecraft, right now in orbit around the asteroid Vesta, is beaming back exciting photos displaying huge equatorial grooves, upper left, separating the heavily-cratered northern hemisphere through smoother terrain in the south, where a catastrophic impact took place the distant past.

Discovered in 1807, Vesta is just about spherical, measuring about 359 miles by 284 miles. It's the biggest member of the asteroid belt yet visited by a robotic spacecraft, 2nd in size only to Ceres, Dawn's following target and, together with Pluto, one of just five known dwarf planets. NASA is actually spending $466 million to understand more about Vesta and Ceres throughout the course of a 10-year mission.

Vesta's surface area is believed to be composed of basaltic rock that ran out of a presumably scorching interior when the asteroid formed some 4.5 billion years in the past. Because of its small size, the asteroid probably cooled rapidly and did not undergo subsequent resurfacing just like larger worlds.

As such, Vesta might have one of the oldest, most captivating surfaces in the solar system, a icy snapshot of the components and conditions that was around at the dawn of the solar system.

"We believe that this goes back to the initial 5 million years of the solar system," Russell suggested. "What occurred back then was that the material that was orbiting that was going to end up being the sun began to condense. We have evidence of what was taking place through very primitive meteorites which have fallen to the Earth.

"Right when Vesta began to come together, we believe there seemed to be a supernova that irradiated the material and added radioactive material to it that when the materials joined together, it had an additional heat source and several of these bodies which were formed melted and then differentiated, they provided a crust of lava and an iron core. Those are examples of the oldest bodies out there."

Previous observations by the Hubble Space Telescope demonstrated what appeared to be a huge impact crater near Vesta's south pole that expands some 285 miles across and measures some 8 miles deep. In excess of 200,000 cubic miles of debris were blasted into space, according to on the Dawn press package, a few of which ultimately made its way to Earth as meteorites.

To put the impact into perspective, a proportionately sized crater on Earth might possibly be around the size of the Pacific Ocean.

Images from Dawn show chaotic landscapes near the south pole covered with a magnificent central peak and huge ripple-like lines extending around the asteroid's equator. Terrain north of the lines is much more heavily cratered.

"Those lines are pretty much in the equatorial area and they're very much perpendicular to the direction we assume the impact was going when it struck Vesta," Russell said. "So one thing it could be is that when the compression of that amazing impact came, Vesta got smaller in that direction for a while and after that expanded which caused tectonic features around the equatorial region."

Launched on top of a United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket on September 27, 2007, Dawn is the first operational deep space mission to be designed with an ion propulsion system. Instead of burning up liquid propellants in short, high-power bursts, Dawn's propulsion system works by utilizing electrical power to ionize and accelerate electrically charged xenon to velocities ten times more than the exhaust from chemical type rockets.

Dawn's ion propulsion system "only pushes on the spacecraft as hard as this individual sheet of paper pushes on my hand," said Marc Rayman, mission supervisor and chief engineer, holding up a single piece of paper. "And yet little by little, over time, the result of this whisper-like thrust can develop and produce exceptionally high velocity. So this is what I like to call acceleration with patience. And now, our patience is paying off very handsomely indeed."

During final approach to Vesta, Dawn's final velocity was just 60 miles per hour relative to the asteroid. Finally, on July 15, the spacecraft was taken by Vesta's weak gravity, placing it in orbit.

"Thanks to all the thrusting we've been doing all along the way, Dawn was able to gradually creep up on Vesta and slip ever so gently into orbit with similar grace and elegance it's displayed in nearly 1000 days of inner planetary ion thrusting," Rayman explained.

Dawn's preliminary orbit around Vesta carries it over the asteroid's poles at an height of roughly 1,700 miles. The actual orbit's orientation keeps the spacecraft and its massive solar panels in direct sunlight to supply power for its instruments and its propulsion system.

Traveling from north to south, Dawn will accomplish one orbit every three Earth days. Simply because Vesta completes one rotation or "day," every five hours and twenty minutes, Dawn should be able to observe the asteroid's complete illuminated surface every orbit. During south-to-north passes above Vesta's night side, Dawn will transmit saved images and other data back to Earth.

Operating in the initially high survey orbit, Dawn's instruments can provide a global view of Vesta in ultraviolet, visible and infra-red wavelengths. A mapping spectrometer will observe the surface area with a image resolution of 2,300 feet per pixel while the spacecraft's visible-light cameras will resolve features as small as 820 feet across, around 150 times better than photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Dawn's gamma ray and neutron detector will assist researchers characterize the surface composition of Vesta while evaluation of subtle changes in the spacecraft's radio signal, triggered by slight changes in Dawn's orbital velocity, will help scientists map out the actual asteroids gravity field and internal structure.

After seven orbits, or around three weeks in the survey orbit, Dawn's ion propulsion system will spend 30 days or so slowly decreasing the orbit to an altitude of about 420 miles, permitting the spacecraft to circle the asteroid twice each Earth day.

Dawn will complete around 60 trips around Vesta in this so-called high-altitude mapping orbit, or HAMO, surveying the asteroid in outstanding detail, permitting scientists to build topographic maps showing the elevation of hills and mountains and the absolute depths of the craters covering its surface.

After HAMO operations are complete, Dawn will spend about 6 weeks lowering down to a low-altitude mapping orbit, or LAMO, at less than one hundred and ten miles, circling Vesta every 4 hours.

While the lower orbit provides Dawn's cameras sharp views of Vesta's surface, the main goal of this 10-week stage of the mission is to permit the gamma ray and neutron detector to monitor cosmic ray impacts on the surface. High-energy cosmic radiation hitting atoms in the upper three feet of the surface area will generate gamma rays and neutrons that can be used to discover the identities of the original atoms.

The impact of Vesta's gravity on Dawn's orbit will be more noticeable in the low-altitude orbit, allowing scientists to map out its inner mass distribution.

When the low-altitude stage of the mission is complete, Dawn will spend an additional six weeks spiraling out for a 2nd set of observations at an altitude of 420 miles, comparable to the earlier high-altitude mapping orbit. Because approximately eight months will have passed between the 2 sets of observations, a greater portion of Vesta's northern hemisphere will be illuminated as the asteroid's seasons progress and areas not observed earlier will be mapped at the identical level of detail.

If all goes well, Dawn will commence its departure from Vesta in Summer of 2012, setting off on a two-and-a-half-year journey to Ceres. The mission is funded through July 2015.