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NASA has been informing workers and contractors this week that a laptop that had personal information was stolen. The information stored on the laptop included Social Security numbers and other details. The laptop was reportedly stolen from a locked car two weeks ago, and puts information on thousands of workers and contractors at NASA at risk.

Laptop belonged to an employee at NASA headquarters in Washington and while it was protected by a password, the contents of the computer were not fully encrypted. NASA has admitted that the information on the laptop may be accessible to unauthorized users. NASA is investigating the theft and has hired data breach specialists to follow up with individuals whose information was stored on the computer.

NASA associate deputy administrator Richard Keegan said that it could take up to 60 days for all the individuals whose data was lost to be contacted. NASA administrator Charlie Bolden has banned the removal of unencrypted laptops containing sensitive information from any NASA facility. Bolden also ordered security software upgrades for NASA equipment to be completed by December 21.

NASA has also previously warned employees about storing sensitive data on smartphones and other mobile devices. NASA will be offering employees affected by the breach free credit-monitoring services and other support. NASA has reportedly had 48 laptops and other mobile computing devices lost or stolen between April 2009 and April 2011. Many of those devices reportedly contained sensitive data.

[via Reuters]

Stolen NASA laptop leaks personnel details is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This bright blue marble is CFBDSIR2149. Located only 100 light-years away from Earth, this lonely cyan gem may be the very first errant planet detected by humans. And apparently it’s quite beautiful, looking similar to Neptune* while being four to seven times as big as Jupiter. More »

Google created its Google Mars service as a spinoff from Google Earth back in 2009. Since that launch, most of the satellite images offered of Mars were relatively low resolution. That has all changed now with an update for Google Mars that makes the images even sharper than what Google offers of our own planet in many areas.

This week Google Mars received major update thanks to high-definition images sent back from orbit around Mars from the Context Camera. The Context Camera is one of the instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The high-resolution images allow viewers to drill down to a resolution of 20 feet per pixel.

Typically, Google Earth images have a resolution of 50 feet per pixel. If you have Google Earth, you can access Google Mars by clicking on the orange Saturn-shaped button at the top of the screen on Google Earth. It is worth noting that Google Earth does have higher-resolution images for some cities down to as low as 12-inches per pixel.

Before this month’s update, the only high-resolution images on Mars had been provided by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The gray bands you see in the image above are areas covered with the Context Camera update.

[via Business Insider]

Google Mars images are sharper than Google Earth images is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Dark energy, time-traveling star gazing, and a telescope that looks like a Bond villain’s ray gun: when it comes to hunting down the reasons why the universe is expanding, it’s hard to know what aspect is cooler. The BOSS (Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) team in New Mexico, US, has been peering into the depths of distant galaxies with the Sloan telescope, tracking the movement of quasars so as to measure how the universe has been changing since the Big Bang.

In a new paper submitted by the BOSS team to the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal, the researchers describe a new technique for tracking more distant galaxies than has previously been attempted. Rather than spotting the galaxies themselves, which are too dim for the Sloan telescope to keep its metaphorical eye on, BOSS has been eyeing nearly 50,000 quasars to put together a 3D map of their distribution and movement with those galaxies.

That alternate view means the BOSS astronomers can follow movement up to 11 billion light years away from Earth. Because of the speed of light, the quasars that are being seen today are as they were many, many years ago: two billion years after the Big Bang itself, in fact.

“From the Big Bang, the expansion of the Universe was decelerating,” Dr Matthew Pieri of the BOSS team said, ”and then we crested the hill about seven billion years ago, and it was like something putting the foot on the pedal and the acceleration occurred.”

Dark energy is science’s answer to why gravity alone can’t explain the movement of galaxies, an invisible force that pushes matter apart and thus continues the expansion of the universe. As much as 73-percent of the universe is dark energy, it’s theorized, with 23-percent being dark matter; special cameras, such as the 570-megapixel DECam, have been developed to better study it.

[via BBC]

Dark energy spotted driving universe expansion is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Space junk is an undeniable problem when there’s over 500,000 dead satellites, spacecraft pieces and other human-made obstacles that could crash into active orbiting vehicles. DARPA is more than a little overwhelmed in trying to track all those hazards by itself, so it’s recruiting amateur help through its new SpaceView program. The effort will buy time for non-professional astronomers on existing telescopes, or even supply hardware directly, to track the spaceborne debris without the sheer expense of growing an existing surveillance network. While that amounts to using hobbyists purely as volunteers, DARPA notes that the strategy could be a win-win for some when hardware donated for SpaceView could be used for regular astronomy in spare moments. The challenge is getting through the sign-up phase. While SpaceView is taking applications now, it’s initially focusing on options for standard commercial telescopes and hand-picking those who have permanent access to hardware in the right locations — there’s no guarantee a backyard observatory will pass muster. Those who do clear the bar might sleep well knowing that satellites and rockets should be that much safer in the future.

Continue reading DARPA SpaceView program enlists us to track space debris, save a satellite today (video)

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