Starry Skies Network

With the help of Stargazing Live, 69,962 citizen scientists
are exploring the surface of Mars like never before. And you can too!
http://planetfour.org/

After two decades of construction, the world’s largest and most powerful radio telescope has begun operating…  Voice of America:  Chile Inaugurates World’s Most Powerful Space Telescope

Is there life on Mars or did it previously support life?”  Short answer, we still don’t know…

theverge.com: Is there life on Mars? Why the question still eludes us after years of discovery  NASA is slowly learning where to look for microbes on the Red Planet, but there are no answers yet

NPR reports: Monarch butterflies that once covered 50 square acres of forest during their summer layover in central Mexico now occupy fewer than 3 acres, according to the latest census.

If we ever come across traces of an advanced alien civilization like the one featured in “Prometheus,” the new semi-prequel to the “Alien” movie series, our first course of action should not be to send them a shipload of human meat. Instead, send in the robots.

The United States wants more global cooperation in space including joint war games and combined operations with allies, and is pushing for data-sharing deals with France, Japan and other countries, a U.S. defense official said in an interview.

The EU officially started on 5 June the multilateral diplomatic process aimed at drafting an International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities. With the rising level of space activities, the EU took the leading role in ensuring greater security and legal certainty in outer space.

On the agenda of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space meeting currently being held in Vienna is the increasingly urgent problem of space debris.

Space travel inspires us to dream about tomorrow, says Neil deGrasse Tyson. So why did we give up? As a nation, we need to keep reaching for the stars, to push back our boundaries and stake out new frontiers.

For 50 years, it’s been a critical part of Florida’s economy. But now our space industry is struggling to survive. The retirement of the shuttle program has left thousands of workers jobless. And, it’s also called into question whether Florida’s days as America’s pre-eminent space state are over.

Mercury and Shuttle astronaut John Glenn has been named as one of President Barack Obama’s recipients for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Glenn was the first U.S. astronaut to reach orbit in 1961 atop and Atlas rocket. Glenn left NASA in 1964. He would then spend some two and a half decades serving his home state of Ohio as a senator.

The alerts from U.S. Strategic Command now arrive every couple of weeks — warnings that space junk is hurtling toward one of Canada’s multi-million-dollar satellites.

“Let’s take the Internet out of the control of terrestrial entities.”
This call to arms, issued by hacker activist Nick Farr, is the rallying cry behind a new plan to launch satellites into space to prevent Internet censorship.

China plans to put laboratories in space, collect samples from the moon and prepare to build space stations over the next five years, according to an ambitious plan released this week aimed at putting the country on the global map for space exploration.

It’s remotely possible the world will end in December 2012. But don’t credit the ancient Maya calendar for predicting it, say experts on the Mesoamerican culture.

A blackened, curled, oversized finger, long claimed to belong to a yeti, has been identified as human after all.
Featuring a long nail, the mummified relic — 3.5 inches long and almost an inch thick at its widest part — has languished for decades in the Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum in London.

On Dec. 31, the Gregorian calendar did something terrifying. It flipped from the year “2011″ to “2012.”
What did we experience as the year came to an end? Global earthquakes? A planetary collision? Weird gravitational effects caused by an alignment with the galactic plain? A comet impact? Global enlightenment?

Dava Sobel, who has written a new book about Copernicus, pages through a first edition copy of the astronomer’s 1543 work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres at Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Edmond Halley has been given the Google Doodle seal of approval to mark his 355th birthday.
Google artists have created a logo depicting planets and rockets to celebrate the life of the man who was the first to calculate the orbit of the comet later named after him.

Readers of this space will recall that there was a leak of an internal NASA document a couple weeks ago that showed what a waste of money the Senate Launch System is, by presenting an analysis that using existing launch systems and orbital storage of propellants will cost tens of billions less and accelerate by several years the schedule under which we could be sending humans beyond earth orbit.