Our planet Earth is relatively young compared to the rest of the universe. As a matter of fact, NASA scientists recently witnessed an explosion that took place from halfway across the universe. The light of the explosion took 7.5 billion years to get to us - meaning that it took place long before the Earth was formed. The rest of the story awaits after the jump!

And the world's search for new sources of fuel continues. This time around, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) turned its sights to a hurricane.

It sounds unlikely but a new research suggests that the "calm" eye of any hurricane is in fact packed with energy that keeps the weather powerhouse running.

"The spinning flow of air parcels - or vortices - in the eye can carry very warm, moist eye air into the eyewall that acts as a turbocharger for the hurricane heat engine," says Scott Braun, research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Researchers used computer simulations and observations of 1998's Hurricane Bonnie in southern North Carolina. U.S. Naval Postgraduate School Professor of Meteorology Michael Montgomery, likewise, said that the interaction between the moisture-enriched air parcels, the main eyewall, and the lower eyewall cloud is similar to "increasing the octane level in auto fuel." He added,

This discovery may help explain why strong storms can remain intense for several hours or longer after encountering conditions that usually bring weakening. Ongoing research will add to our understanding of the dynamics associated with storm intensity so that we can pinpoint the variables and processes that must be represented in numerical models to improve intensity forecasts.

The study is promising but its proponents believe that harnessing hurricanes as next source of fuel is still far from being a reality. One significant challenge that remains is forecasting a hurricane's intensity.

 

The image above doesn't quite cut it since the lunar eclipse later today would be a total lunar eclipse, as opposed to the partial seen above.

Anyway, lunar eclipses occur when the moon gets into the Earth's shadow (meaning the Earth is between the sun and the moon). This happens when the Earth, sun and moon are lined up - plus the moon has to be full. During a total lunar eclipse, the moon would appear to have a reddish orange color or an ashen gray. This will happen for one hour and 13 minutes today and all the continents would have a chance to see it. Europe and Africa, however, have the best seats.

Observers in Europe and Africa will be able to see the Earth's shadow creeping along the moon's surface. Australia and Asia will only catch a glimpse of the eclipsed moon as it disappears. On this side of the world, the east coast will get a chance to watch the eclipse at 4:30 P.M. EST, ending at 8:50 EST. Fred Espenak, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center says, "The total eclipse will be in progress just at sunset. You'll have to be patient for the sky to get dark enough to pick out the moon."

Don't worry if you're going to miss this one, there's another eclipse on August 28 and will favor the West Coast.

Using the Spitzer Space Telescope, three teams of NASA scientists have gotten their first close look at two distant planets and they were shocked at what they didn't find more than what they did find.

The look at planets Planet HD 209458b and HD 189733b in the constellations Pegasus and Vulpecula respectively, have debunked the popular claims of theorists that water should be present in their atmospheres in the form of vapor. Instead, all they saw were dust clouds floating in the hydrogen and oxygen atmosphere. 

For years, the popular belief in NASA was if the elements hydrogen and oxygen were present, water can be formed, and when water is present, life has a chance of existing. In these two hot gas giants, the mantra doesn't hold true.

"The main finding is that we don't see evidence for water in the two planets," NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center team leader Jeremy Richardson said.

Scientists still haven't given up on the possibility that water may yet be present underneath the dust clouds, but at this point, there's no way of finding out.

The two "hot Jupiters" were viewed via infrared spectrum technology. Scientists used infrared light to detect the planets and split the wavelengths of the radiation in a manner similar to how a prism chops light into a rainbow. The resulting data can be used to find out the composition of the planet and its motion along its orbit.

Astronomers, with the handy NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, are definitely on the verge of something huge. The images posted above, taken by the telescope, just might prove to be the very first objects in the universe.

Clustered some 13 billion light-years away, the potential "universe-infants" are 1,000 times as massive as the Sun. The other theory as to what these are is that the objects are early blackholes that consume gas "voraciously and spitting out radiation like crazy as nascent galaxies form."

According to Alexander Kashlinsky, lead author on two reports to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, and member of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, "We are pushing our telescopes to the limit and are tantalizingly close to getting a clear picture of the very first collection of objects. Whatever these objects are, they are intrinsically incredibly bright and very different from anything in existence today."

If the cluster of mysterious objects turn out to be composed of stars, then they could be the actual first mini-galaxies. If so, then according to their calculations, each would have a mass that's less than a million suns. Okay, how big is that exactly? Just think, our Milky Way holds about 100 billion suns. The cluster number, that's for each star in there...That's big.

Anyhow, so far, what's making the observation difficult is that they aren't clear-cut. They had to remove light from foreground stars and galaxies so that they could study fluctuations "in what is a relatively diffuse light" (see image above).

Space tech has a habit of finding its way to useful earth-bound uses. One example is the Secure Ambulation Mode, or SAM, a physical therapy device composed of technology developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and designed to help the badly injured walk again.

SAM is an advanced harness-equipped walker designed to assist patients with debilitating lower body injuries (like spinal cord injuries) or diseases (like multiple sclerosis) doing physical therapy, learning how to walk and strengthening leg bones and muscles. The core technology, created by the late James Kerley and adapted by him, Allen Crane and Wayne Eklund for use in a walker-like device, consists of short segments of flexible cable that connect to various hardware. This allows joint-like, multi-directional movement and gives shock absorption features as well - useful features for a physical therapy device like SAM.

SAM itself is manufactured by Enduro Medical Technologies of East Hartford, Conn., which licensed and further adapted the NASA tech, and added the torso-hugging harness to complete the system. The SAM is designed to support the weight of patients who cannot stand on their own, making it easier for them to begin walking and speeding the therapy/rehabilitation process. It's also a boon for hospitals, as teams of therapists will not be needed to support a quadriplegic patient.

Read more after the jump.

Thirty-seven years ago, television history was made when Neil Armstrong's "one small step for man" became the first televised scene broadcast from the surface of another world, of the first human to set foot on that otherworld. The transmission was scratchy and degraded, and wouldn't win any Oscars for film editing, but it was nonetheless thrilling for the viewers back on Earth.

What they didn't know then was that there is a (relatively) better-quality recording of that momentus occassion. Stored on tape.

Archivists and veterans of the Apollo 11 tracking station crew are now looking for these tapes, hoping to digitize and enhance them to provide the world with a video image better than the one witnessed thirty-seven years ago. They face the proverbial haystack, however, searching through the archives, hoping that the three decade-old magnetic tapes haven't deteriorated with time. Or have been wiped clean of their memory.

The slow-scan television (SSTV) transmissions from Apollo 11 (and subsequent missions) were backed up on tape just in case equipment glitches or problems converting SSTV signals to NTSC-standard TV broadcasts cropped up. Luckily for the live audiences of 1969, the backups were never needed, and the tapes were sent to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center for archiving. The good thing about the raw SSTV tapes is that, while they are not up to par with contemporary TV resolutions - let alone HDTV - they are still a sight better than the currently accessible archive of the moon landings, the original, scratchy NTSC-converted TV transmission. If enhanced with current-day technology, they can provide contemporary audiences with a clearer picture of the Moon landings. Literally.

1969-era NTSC converted transmission on the left; SSTV Polaroid vidcap on the right. You be the judge.

The problem is that the tapes themselves seem to have been buried in an archival tidal wave. First things first, however, the tapes are not and cannot be described as "lost," argues Bill Wood, technical spokesman for the American group searching for the Apollo SSTV archives and a retired NASA tracking station engineer. Similar sentiments are echoed by John Sarkissian of the  Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organization's Parkes Radio Observatory in Australia. With all NASA attention fixated on getting men to the moon - and back -  archival requirements simply were "lower priority" for the space agency, said Sarkissian.

An even greater worry is that the tapes might have been recycled. At the time, magnetic telemetry tapes of the type used for the SSTV backups were as costly as MidEast oil today. Wood speculates that there is a 50/50 chance the tapes may have been wiped clean at Goddard and reused. He still refuses to give up hope, however. “What we’re hoping, though, is that somebody, maybe, might have saved some of them,” he said.

Beyond increasing the video archives on the Moon landings, the hunt for old Apollo-era mission data also serves to make this wealth of information available to today's higher-tech world for even more detailed scientific investigation, to stoke the dreams  of future lunar explorations, and - on a more mundane note - to make sure the past does not disappear completely. Deterioration of 1960's-era storage media, such as magnetic tape, remains a serious concern among NASA and academic archivists.

In addition to its famous "Great Red Spot," Jupiter had a smaller "White Spot" - which recently turned red.  "Red Spot Junior," as it has been dubbed, recently buzzed its larger sibling. This close encounter between the two Red Spots did not appear to weaken the smaller of the two, but astronomers are still keeping Hubble's eye on it. The two Red Spots were 3500 kilometers apart (less than 2200 miles) at their closest approach on July 15thThere should be a, and will completely pass one another by the end of the month.

The small White Spot  designated as Oval BA changed its color earlier this year. "We don't know why it is red," says Amy Simon-Miller, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "It seems likely that the color is tied to storm strength."

Despite their proximity,  the pair is unlikely to merge, forming a "mega-storm," since Jupiter's jet streams keep each corralled into their respective latitudes. The passing could still weaken Oval BA and turn it back into a white storm, however.

Oval BA initially formed when two white ovals merged in 1998. A third one joined them in 2000. Currently, Jupiter is moving out of Hubble's range, and will not be back in position until next February.  Other instruments, including those of  amateur astronomers, continue observing the phenomenon, however.

You have seen pictures of the Milky Way from the net and from Science books right? Do you wonder what causes that awesome yet mysterious red and blue glows? It's gotta be one of life's tough questions, at par with childlike inquiries such as "Why is the sky blue?" and "Are clouds really white?" But going back to the topic of discussion, some astronomers believe that the Milky Way appears as such because of silicon oxide nanoparticles.

First off, let's focus our attention to the "red" glow. This one is scientifically known as the Extended Red Emission and it was discovered more than 20 years ago. In that said finding, astronomers hypothesized that particles in interstellar dust clouds were absorbing starlight and emitting red light. The hypothesis ends there since nobody could pinpoint the nature of those particles. The findings about the red glows led to more questions when astronomers discovered luminescent blue glows in some regions of the interstellar space just last year.

According to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's resident astrochemist, Ashraf Ali, these interstellar dust clouds or nanodiamonds could be the answer to the queries about why there are red glows, but he could only hope that these nanodiamaonds are also the reason behind the blue ones. A bigger mystery to the researchers is that nobody has a clue as to how they could have formed in space.

So with that, Ali and his colleagues moved on to another hypothesis. They now believe that nanoparticles of silicon oxide are responsible. To test their scientific guess that solid crystals could be made from silicon oxide gas in space, the team recreated the pressure and temperature conditions found in the regions around stars and successfully created clusters of silicon oxide nanoparticles. If their findings are correct, these clusters are predicted to to produce both red and blue light when they absorb starlight -- thus answering one of life's toughest questions.

NASA's Discovery shuttle may be "under the weather" but its Hubble Space Telescope is back in full power after its ailing Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) was successfully re-activated Friday morning. NASA officials initiated the successful switchover to backup power for the camera and science observations are schedule to resume Sunday.

"This is the best possible news," said Ed Ruitberg, deputy associate director for the Astrophysics Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "We were confident we could work through the camera issue, and now we can get back to doing more incredible science with the camera."

The ACS is a composite of three electronic cameras that detect light from the ultraviolet to the near infrared installed during a March 2002 servicing mission. NASA officials are optimistic that the ACS will continue functioning until Hubble's next servicing mission, which is tentatively scheduled for 2007.