Hubble: 19th Anniversary

A Hubble Heritage Release

Over the past 19 years Hubble has taken dozens of exotic pictures of galaxies going "bump in the night" as they collide with each other and have a variety of close encounters of the galactic kind. Just when you thought these interactions couldn't look any stranger, this image of a trio of galaxies, called Arp 194, looks like one of the galaxies has sprung a leak. The bright blue streamer is really a stretched spiral arm full of newborn blue stars. This typically happens when two galaxies interact and gravitationally tug at each other.

Resembling a pair of owl eyes, the two nuclei of the colliding galaxies can be seen in the process of merging at the upper left. The blue bridge looks like it connects to a third galaxy. In reality the galaxy is in the background and not connected at all. Hubble's sharp view allows astronomers to try and visually sort out what are foreground and background objects when galaxies, superficially, appear to overlap. This picture was issued to celebrate the 19th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1990. During the past 19 years Hubble has made more than 880,000 observations and snapped over 570,000 images of 29,000 celestial objects.

Source http://hubblesite.org

AMES: Data Mining

The Ames Data Mining and Complex Adaptive Systems Group supports ISHM in three ways: by using anomaly detection algorithms for fault detection, by using data mining for prognostics, and by using distributed adaptive control for self-maintenance and recovery.

Benefit
Integrated system health management will be a key contributor to the safety, reliability, and affordability of future exploration missions. Data mining and complex systems design can be combined with other ISHM approaches to obtain higher ISHM performance at lower cost.

Source: NASA

On June 12th, just as Russia's Sarychev Peak volcano was erupting for the first time in 20 years, the International Space Station flew directly overhead. Astronauts had their camera ready and snapped one of the most dramatic Earth-science photos ever taken from space:

Free satellites photos

Satellite images became commercially available, at very steep prices. But, still free satellite images when are actually available, they are paid by advertisers. There's no yet reliable source of free satellite photos.

Astro news: Scientists to see Moon's Dark Craters

This composite image depicts the moon's rugged south polar region in two lights. The black and white image on the left is a computer generated view of the pole from radar reflectance data. The color image on the right is a topographic map of that same area. The color image on the right is the highest resolution topography map to date of the moon's south pole. It was generated by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., using data collecetd using the Deep Space Network's Goldstone Solar System Radar located in California's Mojave Desert. The new map provides contiguous topographic detail over a region approximately 500 kilometers by 400 kilometers (311 miles by 249 miles).
Source: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/moon-20090618.html

Astro news

Scientists Bring 'Light' To Moon's Permanently Dark Craters

Small black holes

Micro black holes, are tiny hypothetical black holes also called quantum mechanical black holes or mini black holes, for which quantum mechanical effects play an important role.
In principle, a black hole can have any mass significantly above the Planck mass. In 1974 Stephen Hawking argued that due to quantum effects, such black holes "evaporate" by
a process now referred to as Hawking Radiation in which elementary particles (photons, electrons, quarks, gluons, etc.) are emitted. His calculations show that the smaller the size of the black hole, the faster the evaporation rate, resulting in a sudden burst of particles as the micro black hole suddenly explodes. It is possible that such quantum primordial black holes were created in the high-density environment of the early universe (or big bang), or possibly through subsequent phase transitions.

Satellites collision or illusion

I'll go back later to talk about this. But it seems to me like a very big lie. Mechanical laws tell us about their orbits, how could they collide?