Heavens

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite traveled over Tomas twice on Tuesday, Nov. 2. The second time was at 2005 UTC (4:05 p.m. EDT) when it was still classified as a tropical storm. During TRMM's second overpass, Tomas' center of circulation wasn't evident. Today, Nov. 3 that center is reforming.

Bands of strong thunderstorms are wrapping around the center of Tropical Storm Anggrek in the Southern Indian Ocean, according to satellite imagery. NASA's Aqua satellite captured an infrared look at those strong thunderstorms today.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Roughly 3.5 billion years ago, the first epoch on Mars ended. The climate on the red planet then shifted dramatically from a relatively warm, wet period to one that was arid and cold. Yet there was at least one outpost that scientists think bucked the trend.

A team led by planetary geologists at Brown University has discovered mounds of a mineral deposited on a volcanic cone less than 3.5 billion years ago that speak of a warm and wet past and may preserve evidence of one of the most recent habitable microenvironments on Mars.

GALVESTON, Texas — When the space shuttle Discovery lifts off on its final flight Nov. 2, its six astronauts will be joined by 16 rodent passengers on a historic mission of their own.

Riding in special self-contained modules that automatically supply them with food and water, the mice will be part of a long-term NASA effort aimed at understanding why spaceflight makes humans more vulnerable to infection by viruses and bacteria.

Boulder, CO, USA - The islands flanking the outlet of the Mississippi River are not only facing losses due to sea level rise and local subsidence, according to one study, but new unknown impacts from oil recovery operations, say researchers working on another project. Both will be presenting their work on Nov. 1 and 2 at the meeting of the Geological Society of American in Denver. Some islands could disappear entirely in coming decades, exposing huge swaths of marshland to the waves of the open sea.

Two spacecraft are now beginning to study the moon's environment as part of NASA's ARTEMIS mission, whose principal investigator is Vassilis Angelopoulos, a UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences.

One of these satellites has been in the lunar environment since Aug. 25, and the second arrived Oct. 22, marking the start of the ARTEMIS mission to gather new scientific data in the sun-Earth-moon environment.

ARTEMIS is an acronym for Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the Sun.

Nearly one in four stars like the sun could have Earth-size planets, according to a University of California, Berkeley, study of nearby solar-mass stars.

UC Berkeley astronomers Andrew Howard and Geoffrey Marcy chose 166 G and K stars within 80 light years of Earth and observed them with the powerful Keck telescope for five years in order to determine the number, mass and orbital distance of any of the stars' planets. The sun is the best known of the G stars, which are yellow, while K-type dwarfs are slightly smaller, orange-red stars.

PULLMAN, Wash. - For the chance to watch the sun rise over Olympus Mons, or maybe take a stroll across the vast plains of the Vastitas Borealis, would you sign on for a one-way flight to Mars?

It's a question that gives pause to even Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a Washington State University associate professor, who, with colleague Paul Davies, a physicist and cosmologist from Arizona State University, argues for precisely such a one-way manned mission to Mars in an article published this month in the "Journal of Cosmology."

Two micro-satellites originally launched into Earth's orbit in 2007 by NASA have been redirected by University of California, Berkeley, scientists toward new orbits around the moon, extending study of the earth and moon's interaction with the solar wind.

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered the most massive neutron star yet found, a discovery with strong and wide-ranging impacts across several fields of physics and astrophysics.

Astronomers are used to looking millions of years into the past. Now scientists have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to look thousands of years into the future. Looking at the heart of Omega Centauri, a globular cluster in the Milky Way, they have calculated how the stars there will move over the next 10 000 years.

AMES, Iowa – The quantity and quality of data coming back from NASA's Kepler Mission is changing how astronomers study stars, said Iowa State University's Steve Kawaler.

"It's really amazing," said Kawaler, an Iowa State professor of physics and astronomy. "It's as amazing as I feared. I didn't appreciate how hard it is to digest all the information efficiently."

The Kepler spacecraft, he said, "is a discovery machine."