salem6sci

When you picture the lowest levels of the food chain, you might imagine herbivores happily munching on lush, living green plants. But this idyllic image leaves out a huge (and slightly less appetizing) source of nourishment: dead stuff. John C. Moore details the "brown food chain," explaining how such unlikely delicacies as pond scum and animal poop contribute enormous amounts of energy to our ecosystems

After 30 years of missions, NASA finally retired its aging space fleet in 2011. Since then, they've been dependent on Russian capsules to take Americans to and from the ISS, at the prohibitive cost of about $70 billion per astronaut. But recently signed deals with Boeing and SpaceX are supposed to fill the gap, using commercial spacecraft to transport station personnel. Much of the maintenance shown in Wilmore and Virt's video is in preparation for these commercial flights, which are meant to commence in 2017. The footage was intended to give future astronauts an idea of what working on the station would be like when they arrived. Here is a short edit of the clips from the AP:  

Just a week after NASA scientists announced their certainty of finding alien life within the next 20 years, a team of scientists say they've found no obvious signs of advanced extraterrestrial life after searching 100,000 galaxies.

It's a warm, sunny day in April, and all the trees are in bloom. But how did they know it was warm and sunny? And on a warm, sunny day in February, what keeps them from blooming? Scott Aker, a horticulturalist at the U.S. National Arboretum, tells Robinson Meyer how the process works and what to look for.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) officials want to know who dumped pet goldfish into the state's Teller Lake #5. The lake is now overrun with the fish, which number upwards of 3,000, according to ABC News.

Being non-native, the fish present a threat to other life in the lake.

"Goldfish are not a native species and are very harmful to the local aquatic ecosystem," said Kristin Cannon, district wildlife manager for Boulder, Colo., in a press release. "We strongly encourage the public not to dump their unwanted pet fish in our waters. It is bad for our environment as well as illegal."

Rap Battle looking at what are the / how do we qualify something to be a planet 

Rap Battle between Brahe & Kepler describing the development on planetary models 

We've seen dozens and dozens of photos and videos of Friday's solar eclipse, but most of them have one thing in common: They're taken from Earth.

The European Space Agency posted an image of the eclipse as seen from an entirely different perspective: space. The agency's sun-watching Proba-2 mini-satellite took this photo Friday, using extreme ultraviolet wavelengths to capture the sun's corona.

How feasible is the Mars One plan?
Currently, it's not. One of the biggest claims made by the Mars One team is that absolutely no new technology needs to be developed for the success of their mission, which is setting up a colony on Mars. We found that there are several cases for systems like the environmental control and life support where that's just not true.

The Mars One project has narrowed down its list of applicants to 100 people, who will now go through further training before the final team is selected.

More than 200,000 people applied to Mars One in 2013, hoping to be chosen to colonize Mars. Applicants had to be at least 18 years old, healthy and between 5'2" and 6'3" tall, as well as fulfilling various personality requirements such as exhibiting adaptability, resiliency, and resourcefulness. During the next round of the selection process, the number was whittled down to 660 during a series of interviews and tests, while the next round will give the remaining 100 people a chance to train in teams in an earthbound copy of the future Mars outpost.

A very cool opinion piece detailing reasons that we should pursue a manned mission to Mars. Could be used to study the topic or to study argumentation.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live on the moon? What about Mars, or Venus or Mercury? We sure have and that's why we decided to find out what it might be like to live on other worlds in our solar system, from Mercury to Pluto and beyond in a new, weekly 12-part series.

For this series, written by Space.com contributor Joseph Castro, we wanted to know what the physical sensation of living on other worlds would be like: What would the gravity be like on Mercury; How long would your day be on Venus? What's the weather on Titan?

Overall, Geyer and his team estimated that a small number of nations accounted for the most plastic trash found in the oceans. In fact, 20 countries were responsible for 83 percent of all of the world's mismanaged plastic waste going into the deep blue sea. China was deemed the big bad wolf of plastic waste, generating up to 3.5 million tons of marine junk per year. The United States ranked 20th, dumping about 110,000 metric tons per year.

In a sneak peek of a possible future mission to Saturn's moon Titan, NASA has showcased their vision of a robotic submersible that could explore the moon's vast lakes of liquid methane and ethane.

VIDEO: Can a Moon be Older Than its Planet?

Studying Titan is thought to be looking back in time at an embryonic Earth, only a lot colder. Titan is the only moon in the solar system to have a significant atmosphere and this atmosphere is known to possess its own methane cycle, like Earth's water cycle. Methane exists in a liquid state, raining down on a landscape laced with hydrocarbons, forming rivers, valleys and seas.

ESA's Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle is ready for its launch and reentry mission on 11 February. The launch is scheduled for 13:00 GMT (14:00 CET) atop a Vega rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana. Streaming starts at 12:45 GMT (13:45 CET)

This IXV mission will test cutting-edge system and technology aspects to provide Europe with an independent reentry capability, and a building block for reusable space transportation systems. It will validate designs for lifting-bodies, incorporating both the simplicity of capsules and the performance of winged vehicles, with high controllability and manoeuvrability for precision landing.

The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to launch an experimental space plane this Wednesday to test out technologies needed for vehicles to survive the return to Earth from space.

The unmanned space plane, called the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV), is slated to blast off Wednesday (Feb. 11) at 8 a.m. EST (1300 GMT) from French Guiana. Its suborbital flight will last 100 minutes. But first, the reusable spacecraft must separate from the rocket by itself while out of contact with Earth. (You can watch the IXV liftoff live here on Space.com, courtesy of ESA.)

0

Update 5:53 p.m. Well that was quick. High upper altitude winds scrubbed the launch for tonight, so SpaceX will have to try again tomorrow. See you then!
Update 5:50 p.m. We're getting ready to roll! The SpaceX livestream is up and running, with some snappy elevator music to keep us occupied until we see what's going on at the launch pad.
Original story below:
For SpaceX tonight, it's time for round two of "catch the rocket."
The company will attempt to launch another Falcon 9 rocket at 6:05 p.m. ET. On board is the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a satellite designed to orbit the Earth and keep a lookout for incoming solar storms that can muck up communication and power systems.
DSCOVR has waited 17 long years to get into space, making this launch particularly exciting. But an extra-special part of this mission happens after launch: The majority of the Falcon 9 rocket will attempt to safely land itself on an autonomous drone ship floating in the Atlantic Ocean. If the feat is successful, it'll be a big step toward a future in which reusable rockets may become the norm.
Typically, most of a rocket is either destroyed or lost after it leaves the launch pad, never to be recovered. This makes space travel pricey because an entirely new rocket must be built for every launch. SpaceX hopes to change that paradigm by recovering as much of the rocket as it can for reuse in future launches. And that could drastically reduce the cost of spaceflight.
To save its rockets, SpaceX now equips them with "hypersonic grid fins." These pop-out devices slow and guide the Falcon 9 toward its target, and they're powered by a hydraulic system that releases fluids over time to control the descent. In a previous attempt to land a Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX apparently didn't store enough hydraulic fluid in the system. The result: The rocket hit its target a bit too hard:

Astronauts often refer to "the overview effect," the moment, when looking down at Earth from space, they realize our smallness, our fragility and improbable existence, and the need for humanity to protect our one and only home. In Daily Overview, Benjamin Grant seeks to create this cognitive shift for the majority of people who will never travel to space. A Wired article describes his method, he begins by scrolling through Google Earth and selecting the most visually stunning and thought provoking images of both nature and man- "congested metropolises, stunning empty wilderness, and monstrous mining operations." Then he uses color correction sparingly to emphasize the image, much like a photojournalist would edit a RAW file from their camera.

There's a new island in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to an underwater volcano eruption that's been going on for the past month.
The new island is in the Tonga archipelago--a group of islands southeast of Fiji. Scientists discovered it on January 16, about a month into the volcano's eruption. The volcano, called Hunga Tonga, has since stopped erupting.
The island is mostly made of ash and formed around the crater of the volcano, measuring a little more than half a mile wide. The before-and-after images, from the Pleiades satellite, gives a clear picture of how far the ash spread, extending toward on of the two islands that border the underground volcano.

A constantly updated collection of articles from PopSci about the efforts of private companies to get involved in space travel and exploration