Heavens

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope will have two opportunities in the next few years to hunt for Earth-sized planets around the red dwarf Proxima Centauri.

The opportunities will occur in October 2014 and February 2016 when Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to our sun, passes in front of two other stars. Astronomers plotted Proxima Centauri's precise path in the heavens and predicted the two close encounters using data from Hubble.

Our Solar System's Milky Way neighborhood just went upscale. We reside between two major spiral arms of our home galaxy, in a structure called the Local Arm. New research using the ultra-sharp radio vision of the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) indicates that the Local Arm, previously thought to be only a small spur, instead is much more like the adjacent major arms, and is likely a significant branch of one of them.

Fish can hide in the open ocean by manipulating how light reflects off their skin, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. The discovery could someday lead to the development of new camouflage materials for use in the ocean, and it overturns 40 years of conventional wisdom about fish camouflage.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite detected dozens of fires burning in central Africa on June 03, 2013. The fires are outlined in red. Most of the fires burn in grass or cropland, which is brownish in this image.

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of a large light-brown colored plumes of smoke from two large fires burning in New Mexico: the Thompson Ridge Fire (left) and the Tres Lagunas Fire (right).

Inciweb reported that the Thompson Ridge Fire is located in the Valles Caldera National Preserve, located about two miles northeast of La Cueva, New Mexico. The fire is reported to be human-caused, and started on May 31, 2013. So far, 1,906 acres have burned in the Preserve.

NASA's Terra satellite captured this natural-color satellite image of California's Powerhouse Fire with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on June 1, 2013. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS's thermal bands, are outlined in red.

According to the CBSnews.com, "Nearly 3,000 people from some 700 homes were under evacuation orders Monday as a wildfire north of Los Angeles kept growing, feeding on old, dry brush, some of which hadn't burned in decades.

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of a large light-brown colored plume of smoke blowing east-southeast from the Tres Lagunas Fire burning in New Mexico. On June 3, the smoke is forecast to blow in a more northerly and easterly direction, affecting Las Vegas, I-25 and surrounding communities.

Although nearly a thousand exoplanets have been detected indirectly — most using the radial velocity or transit methods [1] — and many more candidates await confirmation, only a dozen exoplanets have been directly imaged. Nine years after ESO's Very Large Telescope captured the first image of an exoplanet, the planetary companion to the brown dwarf 2M1207 (eso0428 - http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso0428/), the same team has caught on camera what is probably the lightest of these objects so far [2][3].

NASA and the Japanese Space Agency's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite captured several images of the storm during the landfall. TRMM captured the first image of Barbara several hours after it made landfall.

The image was taken at 6:46 p.m. PDT on May 29 (01:46 UTC, May 30) and showed the horizontal distribution of rain intensity within the storm. The rainfall images were created at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. To make the image, several data products from various TRMM instruments are combined.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite detected dozens of fires burning in western Mexico on May 30, 2013. The fires are outlined in red.

Ever wish that your car's interior cabin could have separate audio zones for the front and rear seats? It soon may.

A new approach achieves independent listening zones within a car by using small, modified speakers to produce directional sound fields and a signal processing strategy that optimizes the audio signals used to drive each of the speakers. The new design will be presented at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics (ICA 2013), held June 2-7 in Montreal.

Boulder, Colo. — May 30, 2013 — On November 26, 2011, the Mars Science Laboratory began a 253-day, 560-million-kilometer journey to deliver the Curiosity rover to the Red Planet. En route, the Southwest Research Institute-led Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) made detailed measurements of the energetic particle radiation environment inside the spacecraft, providing important insights for future human missions to Mars.

Once the stuff of science fiction, a human mission to Mars may be becoming more feasible, and a new report in the 31 May issue of Science provides insight into the relevant radiation hazards.

Rounded pebbles on the surface of Mars indicate that a stream once flowed on the red planet, according to a new study by a team of scientists from NASA's Curiosity rover mission, including a University of California, Davis, geologist. The study will be published in the May 31 issue of the journal Science.

Rounded pebbles of this size are known to form only when transported through water over long distances. They were discovered between the north rim of the planet's Gale Crater and the base of Mount Sharp, a mountain inside the crater.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A mystery of the moon that imperiled astronauts and spacecraft on lunar missions has been solved by a Purdue University-led team of scientists as part of NASA's GRAIL mission.

Large concentrations of mass lurk on the lunar surface hidden like coral reefs beneath the ocean waves - an unseen and devastating hazard. These concentrations change the gravity field and can either pull a spacecraft in or push it off course, sealing its fate to a crash on the face of the moon.