SciByte

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover reached the edge of a dune on Jan. 30 and photographed the valley on the other side, to aid assessment of whether to cross the dune

A dune across Dingo Gap is about 3 feet (1 meter) high, tapered off at both sides of the gap between two low scarps

Curiosity reached the eastern side of the dune on Jan. 30 and returned images that the rover team is using to guide decisions about upcoming drives

The team operating NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is considering a path across a small sand dune to reach a favorable route to science destinations

A favorable route would skirt some terrain with sharp rocks considered more likely to poke holes in the rover's aluminum wheels

Accumulation of punctures and rips in the wheels accelerated in the fourth quarter of 2013

Ceres observation interruption

In 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi made a 24th observation of the position of Ceres, the asteroid he discovered between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, on 1 Jan 1801. It was the first and largest of the dwarf planets now known. After this, it moved into the light of the Sun, and was lost to view for most of the rest of the year. To mathematically relocate Ceres, Carl Gauss, age 24, took up the challenge to calculate its orbital path, based on the limited number of observations available. His method was tedious, requiring 100 hours of calculation. He began with a rough approximation for the unknown orbit, and then used it to produce a refinement, which became the subject of another improvement.. And so on. Astronomers using them found his results in close agreement as they located Ceres again 25 Nov-31 Dec 1801.«

in 1772, first suggested that an undiscovered planet could exist between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter

Kepler had already noticed the gap between Mars and Jupiter in 1596.

Giuseppe Piazzi at the Academy of Palermo

Thursday, February 6

First-quarter Moon

Mercury is visible in evening twilight, low in the west-southwest. It fades rapidly

Jupiter sets in the west before dawn’s first light

Venus to rise in the east about two hours before sunrise.

Venus, for this world will shine at its brilliant best as the morning “star” in mid-February.

According to researchers

, they've found that exposure to short wavelength, or blue light, during the day can improve alertness and overall performance.

previous research has shown that blue light is able to improve alertness during the night, but our new data demonstrates that these effects also extend to daytime

When a soldier is shot on the battlefield

A medic must pack gauze directly into the wound cavity, sometimes as deep as 5 inches into the body, to stop bleeding from an artery

startup called RevMedx, a small group of veterans, scientists, and engineers who were working on a better way to stop bleeding.

This image shows a

30-meter-wide crater with a rayed blast zone and far-flung secondary material surrounding

Scientists say the impact and resulting explosion threw debris as far as 15 kilometers in distance.

New images from NASA's Curiosity Mars rover show Earth shining brighter than any star in the Martian night sky

even includes our moon, just below Earth

The distance between Earth and Mars when Curiosity took the photo was about 99 million miles (160 million kilometers).

Ever since the first relay for the 1936 summer Olympic games in Berlin, Olympic torches have traditionally been used to carry a burning flame

from Greece to the host country’s stadium

On Nov. 6, 2013 (Nov. 7 UT) a Soyuz TMA-11M rocket launched

Earth shines

in the Martian twilight sky

“A human observer with normal vision, if standing on Mars, could easily see Earth and the moon as two distinct, bright “evening stars,” said NASA

fresh impact crater dominates this image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 19, 2013.

Researchers used HiRISE to examine this site because the orbiter's Context Camera had revealed a change in appearance here between observations in July 2010 and May 2012

The crater spans approximately 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter and is surrounded by a large, rayed blast zone

FEBRUARY 13

Family Portrait Of The Planets

In 1990, the U.S. space probe Voyager I , while heading out to the edge of the Solar System, at 5:12pm PST began a four-hour series of photographs in a look backward which captured the Sun and six planets. An elongated large mozaic was later made by combining about 60 images. In this first “Family Portrait of the Planets”, the Sun appeared almost star-like and the planets were mere dots. Mercury was too close to the sun to photograph. Mars and Pluto, were too small to resolve. This first record of the Solar System from space may remain the only one for decades to follow. Voyager I had a unique lofty perspective, looking down on the plane in which the planets orbit. It had been steadily climbing since it passed Saturn in 1980, and reached an angle of 32 degrees high above the plane of the solar system

Voyager 1 confirms photos of Solar System