Hasta La Gadget!

While the Mars Spirit rover is still stuck, its twin Opportunity has begun imaging a possible meteorite on the surface of the red planet. The chunk of iron isn’t the first one the two rovers have come across, but it’s the largest at about two feet wide and one foot high, according to Discover.

“When you’re driving around on relatively smooth, flat, boring plains for a long time, anything that looks like a decent-sized rock says, ‘Come get me!'” said rover team member Albert Yen, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in the article.

To study the possible meteorite, scientist are training the rover’s alpha particle X-ray spectrometer on it in order to study its composition, the report said. The goal is to gain insight as to what the meteorite saw–atmosphere and surface-wise–when it first landed on Mars however many eons ago.

With today’s tracking-enabled telescopes, digital cameras, and computer software, amateur astronomers are doing more useful work than ever before. Such was the case with Jupiter: it appears that a large object has just struck the surface of the planet. That’s similar to what happened in 1994 with comet Shoemaker-Levy–on the exact date of the 15th anniversary of that impact, in fact, not to mention the 40th anniversary of the Apollo landing.

Space.com reports that while NASA tracked the impact, the initial call came from Anthony Wesley of Murrumbateman, Australia, who told NASA he noticed a new dark “scar” suddenly appear on Jupiter early Friday between 6 a.m. and 12 p.m. EDT.

“I’d noticed a dark spot rotating into view in Jupiter’s south polar region and was starting to get curious,” Wesley wrote on his observation blog. “When first seen close to the limb (and in poor conditions) it was only a vaguely dark spot, I thought likely to be just a normal dark polar storm. However as it rotated further into view, and the conditions also improved, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot.”

Wesley used a 14.5-inch reflector on an equatorial mount for his observations, as a separate New York Times article reports. NASA scientists are still studying the images to figure out what it was that hit Jupiter. (Image credit: Anthony Wesley)

At last! NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent photos of the Apollo lunar landing sites, the first images ever since the Apollo missions. I will say it once again, one last time: Moon landing conspiracy theorists, SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP.

This is the first time that images of the lunar landing sites have been taken by any camera after the Apollo missions. This photo is the Apollo 17 landing site. It was the sixth and final mission to the Moon, manned by Commander Eugene A. Cernan, Command Module Pilot Ronald E. Evans, Lunar Module Pilot Harrison H. Schmitt.

Apollo 16 was launched on April 16, 1972. It was a J-class mission, so it used a Lunar Rover. The astronauts brought back back 94.7 kg of lunar material with them. It was manned by Commander John W. Young, Command Module Pilot T. Kenneth Mattingly Jr., and Lunar Module Pilot Charles M. Duke Jr.

This is Apollo 11. You know. Those guys who got there FIRST. If it was 1969, they would be travelling there right now. It was manned by Mission Commander Neil Alden Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene ‘Buzz’ Aldrin, Jr.

NASA released Thursday newly restored video of the Apollo 11 mission from July 20th, 1969, including video showing the moonwalk more clearly than what has been seen before. It’s part of the 40th anniversary commemoration of astronauts landing on the moon for the first time.

The initial release shows 15 key moments from the mission. The video material came from a variety of sources and was assembled by a team of Apollo-era NASA engineers.

“The restoration is ongoing and may produce even better video,” said Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center that oversaw TV processing during Apollo 11, in a statement. “The restoration project is scheduled to be completed in September and will provide the public, future historians, and the National Archives with the highest quality video of this historic event.”

The new videos are definitely clearer. Unfortunately, an opportunity to make them sharper still was lost, it turns out. NASA concluded after an exhaustive three year search that the original tapes–not the degraded broadcast versions–were most likely erased and reused accidentally sometime in the early 1980s for satellite missions, as NPR reports. But we’ll take whatever we can get, of course.

With that, we’d like to turn it over to you, our readers. What are your memories of the Apollo 11 mission? Let us know in the Comments section below.

Chalk it up to some sophisticated digital imaging: Astronomers have discovered the oldest and farthest supernova ever detected, AFP reports, a huge star that exploded 11 billion years ago.

This time around, scientists tried something different: they compared several years of images taken from one portion of the sky, which let them look for objects that changed in brightness over time, according to the article. Essentially, the astronomers “subtracted” the changes from the original image–which erased the entire galaxy save for the supernova, which had changed.

“What we’re looking for are things that were there one year, but which weren’t there the next,” said Mark Sullivan, an astronomer from the University of Oxford in the UK and one of the authors of the study, in a separate BBC report.

Back in April, NASA’s Swift Observatory detected a 13-billion-year-old gamma-ray burst, most likely from a supernova near the beginning of the universe. But this latest discovery marks the first confirmation of a full-on star explosion. (Image credit: NASA/RCW 86 supernova)