SciByte

A size comparison between the Sun, a low mass star, a brown dwarf, Jupiter, and the Earth. Image credit: NASA

Two of Saturn's shepherd moons keep the planet's F ring in check. Image Credit: NASA/JPL

you can watch all the action, and even take pictures of the events with your iPhone

augmented-reality app that recreates Tranquility Base in your backyard or neighborhood park

download it from iTunes for only $.99.

is for iPhones and iPads only.

in the first 100 days of the outbreak tracked closely

data reported from hospital and clinics

social media data were available almost instantly

others have shown that Twitter and other online sources can provide meaningful information about outbreaks of diseases such as H1N1 and swine flu

new work establishes that the approach is useful for tracking a disease that emerges in the unsafe living conditions that often follow a disaster, says Polgreen.

188,819 tweets that contained or were tagged with the word cholera during the first 100 days of the cholera outbreak

analysis suggests the social tool provides a good measure of the disease’s spread

The researchers compared the tweets to data from HealthMap, a disease-tracking tool that mines Internet news stories, blogs and discussion groups and lets the public report illness by cell phone. Both the Twitter and HealthMap data corresponded to official data from the Haitian Ministry of Public Health.

Official sources of data are better validated, but on the downside they are going to take time

huge pieces of space junk could rain down on us at any moment.

Phobos-Grunt spacecraft

re-enter the atmosphere sometime between Saturday and Monday (Jan. 14 to Jan. 16).

the third uncontrolled satellite re-entry in four months

claims are handled on a case-by-case basis, you might be surprised to learn damage from satellite debris, aka space junk, likely would be covered under most insurance policies

Farmers Insurance, aired a commercial during this winter's college football bowl games offering similar assurances to its current and potential customers.

Experts predict that Russia's failed Mars probe Phobos-Grunt will crash back to Earth in mid-January 2012. This artist's concept shows fuel burning from a ruptured fuel tank as the spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere.CREDIT: Michael Carroll

NASA estimates that our planet's orbital debris cloud contains more than 500,000 pieces larger than a marble and more than 20,000 at least as big as a softball

space junk poses little threat to people on the ground. Most pieces of falling satellites burn up the atmosphere

the bits that make it through are likely to land harmlessly in the ocean or on uninhabited land

To date, nobody is known to have been injured by a chunk of falling debris.

poses a real threat to the craft that orbit and observe our planet and provide navigation and telecommunications services

2009, for example, the Iridium 33 communications satellite was destroyed when it slammed into a defunct Russian satellite.

This computer illustration depicts the density of space junk around Earth in low-Earth orbit.CREDIT: ESA

unmanned 2014 EFT-1 mission will blast Orion into space aboard a Delta 4-Heavy rocket. The capsule will orbit Earth twice while climbing to an altitude of several thousand miles, then rocket back in a high-speed plunge to validate its heat shield and other systems.

Artist's rendering of the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle on a deep space mission.CREDIT: NASA

Acoustic testing

recent acoustic testing of the Orion crew module/launch abort system structure involved hundreds of sensors planted throughout the hardware.

subjected it to the flight environment

chamber gets up to 150 decibels…like a rifle shot right next to your ear. It's pretty loud. All that sound…it's like a really loud rock concert

Huge heat shield

underside of Orion's crew module is the heat shield

measuring 16.5 feet (5 m) in diameter

Thermal Protection System advances heritage materials from the NASA's space shuttle and Apollo programs to create a next-generation system that can withstand the extreme environments of piloted deep space missions.

a planet, moons could be carving these rings

it could be newborn planets that are responsible.

suggests that this breed of star could be the place to search for Earth-like rocky planets

85 out of 900 potential planetary systems identified by Kepler have been found in red dwarf systems.

A comparison of KOI-961 and its tiny planets with our own planet Jupiter and its four large moons. Image: NASA/JPL Caltech

KOI-961 also bears striking resemblance to the well-studied nearby red dwarf, Barnard's Star, which is only six light years away

In December 2011, scientists announced

: a planet 2.4 times the size of Earth

Later in the month

team announced the discovery of the first Earth-size planets

using NASA's Kepler

do the rings encompass a planet or a companion star?

four defined rings stretch out tens of millions of kilometres from the central object

dubbed Rochester, Sutherland, Campanas and Tololo after the sites where the eclipsed star was first detected and analysed

similar in mass to our own Sun, but a fraction of its age at just 16 million years.

Usually a star’s light is temporarily and periodically dimmed as a planet passes in front of it

in this case the team observed an unusually long and deep eclipse with up to 95 percent of the star’s light being dimmed by what the team conclude is a dusty ring system.

the only plausible explanation was some sort of dust ring system orbiting a smaller companion

Saturn on steroids

the first time astronomers have detected an extrasolar ring system transiting a Sun-like star

astronomers are unable to conclude what the ring system is orbiting

could be a very low-mass star, a brown dwarf, or a gas planet

hope to find the answer

over the next two years

another mystery

two pronounced gaps located between rings

gaps are carved by moons that have enough mass to gravitationally clear a path along their orbits

Saturnian system

brown dwarf or star then we could be seeing the late stages of planet formation in action

a giant planet, then perhaps there is a moon in the making.