Hasta La Gadget!

Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Washington are receiving $1.6 million from the Department of Energy (DOE) to enable the automated discovery of astrophysical phenomena.

The idea is to capitalize on a new generation of telescopes–to be built and deployed over the next decade–by automating the sifting of massive amounts of cosmological data. The tools will be able to spot new objects for further study, as well as identify patterns in observational data that could help scientists understand how the universe evolved.

Hold onto your phasers: a new rocket, designed jointly by NASA, Ad Astra, and Canadian firm Nautel, could potentially slash trip times to Mars to as little as 39 days. And yep, it uses ion propulsion–just like Star Trek taught us.

Ion propulsion, via the new plasma-based VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) engine, is now close to the point where it could be tested on a flight to the moon, according to Canada.com. The rocket works by turning electrical power into thrust in order to harness solar energy.

The 39 day time compares to six months using current rocket technology. Actually, a round-trip ticket to Mars would take far longer than even six months. Since Mars and Earth only pass close to each other every two years, engineers assume a crew would go one way, wait a year, and then fly back the next time the planets passed each other by, according to the report.

The ion drive would enable astronauts to shoot there and back during a single close approach. (Image credit: Ad Astra) (Via Slashdot)

Scientists have discovered a huge ring around Saturn–and no, not the ones we already all know about. (This isn’t The Onion.)

NASA scientists have found a ring much further out from the planet, one that’s made up of debris from Saturn’s distant moon Phoebe, according to Space.com. It turns out astronomers have long suspected the presence of this ring because of the color of another one of the planet’s moons, Iapetus. Iapetus has one dark side and one light side; some scientists figured that it could be debris dust from Phoebe, since the composition was very similar, according to the report.

It’s possible that the Red Planet wasn’t always red.

New research has found a compelling explanation for Mars’ trademark rusty color, according to Space.com. Drawing data from NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers, scientists are theorizing that the red color is a relatively new development due to the erosion of rocks on the planet’s surface, yielding a red mineral that stains the dust, the report said.

It turns out it’s something we could replicate on Earth. Here’s how it works, according to Jonathan Merrison of the Aarhus Mars Simulation Laboratory in Denmark: seal samples of quartz sand in flask flasks, and then tumble them over and over again. The process simulates gentle winds on the surface of Mars, and reduces about 10 percent of the grains to rust over a period of seven months. Then, add powdered magnetite–an iron oxide found on the red planet–and watch the sand become red as it continues to tumble in the flasks.

“We think we have a process that explains how the dust became red without liquid water, which doesn’t seem to fit in with the data,” Merrison said in the report. “Before this work, I think most people in the field kind of thought the Martian surface was billions of years old and had always been red. This work seems to imply that it could be quite recent – millions of years instead of billions of years.” (Image credit: NASA)

Around the corner from the PCMag.com office is a construction site for a hi-rise apartment complex. Last Tuesday, when I passed it on my lunch hour, I noticed one of the workers pointing his iPhone’s camera up at the structure, so I tried to see what he was aiming at.

Above the building, I spotted a rainbow-like arc that I immediately recognized as a portion of a solar halo, and snapped a number of pictures of it (such as the one above) mostly with my Canon SD990 IS. (I even got a few good shots of it with my iPhone.)

In observing and photographing solar halo phenomena, the biggest obstacle, ironically, is the Sun itself. You must avoid looking at the Sun–even when partially obscured by thin clouds, looking directly at it can cause eye damage. As for photography, the Sun’s glare can wash out much of the detail of the delicate arcs, and spots, as well as the structure of the accompanying cirrostratus (and sometimes cirrus) clouds. So be sure to hide the Sun behind a tree, a building, a street sign, or other object–even a hand will do in a pinch.

Note that in photographing a halo, you’ll need to focus on the sky rather than the nearby object, or else the halo will be blurred. You can do this by pointing the camera at the open sky and engaging the autofocus if you’re in automatic mode–usually, a green box will appear when the shutter is half-pressed. Then, while keeping the shutter half-pressed, you should return to your initial framing with the nearby object in view, and press the shutter fully to complete the shot) It’s a good idea to move the camera around a bit to find the place with the least glare before you shoot. Although it’s good to try both, I find that wider-field shots often work better than close-ups–for one thing, if you want to capture the entire solar halo, it may be necessary to go as wide as you can.