Northern Lights Viewed From the International Space Station

 Astronaut Mike Hopkins, aboard the International Space Station, shared this picture of the northern lights on Oct. 9, 2013, saying "The pic doesn't do the northern lights justice. Covered the whole sky. Truly amazing!" The northern lights are caused by collisions between fast-moving particles (electrons) from space and the oxygen and nitrogen gas in our atmosphere. These electrons originate in the magnetosphere, the region of space controlled by Earth’s magnetic field. As they rain into the atmosphere, the electrons impart energy to oxygen and nitrogen molecules, making them excited. When the molecules return to their normal state, they release photons, small bursts of energy in the form of light.

Astronauts have used hand-held cameras to photograph the Earth for more than 40 years. Beginning with the Mercury missions in the early 1960s, astronauts have taken more than 700,000 photographs of the Earth. Today, the space station continues the NASA tradition of Earth observation from human-tended spacecraft.

Space tourism poses challenges on health

The world may be on the brink of a vast new frontier of tourism - and that could raise a few odd, and at this point unanswerable, questions for doctors.
Such as, "What is the maximum time my patient with osteoporosis can spend on a vacation at a space hotel?"
That is exactly a question posed in a paper released Friday, proposing that the medical community needs to start thinking now about how to treat and advise the space tourists of the future.
"If someone's dream is to fly, we want them to fly," said Dr. Marlene Grenon, a UCSF vascular surgeon and co-author of the paper published in the British Medical Journal. "This field of space tourism is being created as we speak. It's going to be important to discuss the medical challenges now."
So maybe it'll be a few years - or decades, if we're talking about hotels - before space tourism takes off in the United States. As of now, only seven non-astronaut travelers have made it to space, all of them on board Russian rockets that carried them to the International Space Station for tens of millions of dollars each.
But the American space tourism industry is blooming, with half a dozen aerospace companies building aircraft to take regular folk into space - be it on two-hour suborbital adventures or multiday cruises around the planet.

500 ready to go

Virgin Galactic, the best known of the space tourism companies, has more than 500 reservations - at $200,000 a ticket - for its first suborbital jaunt, which could take place in the next year or two. Just last week, a California state senator introduced legislation to give tax breaks to companies that build spaceports for launching spaceships.
With space tourism on the cusp of becoming a real possibility for people who don't have the health and fitness of a NASA astronaut, now is the time to think about medical guidelines, said aerospace medicine experts.
There's a wealth of information about the effects of space travel on career astronauts - from the symptoms of space sickness to the long-term repercussions of lengthy stays at the International Space Station. But the effects on the average person with imperfect health are unknown.
"If you're going into space for minutes, or even for a day or two, I would think the impact would be relatively small for the average somewhat healthy person," said Dr. Peter Lee, a Stanford heart researcher who has conducted experiments on muscle atrophy in space.
"The question is if you get into patients with mild heart disease or pulmonary disease," Lee said. "No one with those diseases has ever been allowed to fly. So some of it will be a little bit of trial and error, and initially (the space tourism companies) will probably be conservative."

Why 'Galactic' tourism may really take off (by a man who's already been to the moon)

Astronaut Charles M Duke Jr, now 76, walked on the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission of 1972. He served as Lunar Module pilot on the trip and was the ‘voice’ of Mission Control during the first Moon landing, by Apollo 11, three years earlier. Here, he gives his verdict on the race for space tourism...

Moon man: Astronaut Charles M Duke Jr in 1971

The future looks bright for space tourism. I’m not sure whether there will ever be a Hilton hotel on the Moon, as was suggested in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Probably not a 100-room hotel, but who knows? A trip to the Moon, for the average person, would, of course, be the thrill of a lifetime.
As Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin said, the Moon has ‘magnificent desolation’. I was overcome with the beauty of it. It’s the starkness of the terrain, the contrast between the bright Moon and the dark sky – it would be a wonderful place for any tourist to visit.
The actual trip to the Moon is fascinating, with experiences including feeling zero gravity and looking out to see the Earth receding and the Moon growing closer. I found it thrilling.
I’m really excited about Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, the world’s first commercial spaceline. I met Sir Richard several years ago and admired his enthusiasm.
Since then, I’ve met a number of people who have paid their money to be passengers on one of his commercial space flights and they can’t wait to go.
I would love to take the Virgin Galactic trip into space – it would be tremendous.
The most wonderful part of what these pioneers are going to experience is the view up there of the blackness of space, fading into the light white of the upper atmosphere and into the deep blue as you look back to the Earth.
It’s the view that I would concentrate on. Believe me, it’s spectacular. Kennedy Space Center is a  fascinating place to visit.
NASA’s launch headquarters is the only place on Earth where you can tour launch areas, meet a veteran astronaut, see giant rockets, train in spaceflight simulators and even view a launch.
The next Kennedy rocket launch is scheduled for August 23 this year. NASA is offering visitors rare access to several key areas of Kennedy Space Center during its 50th anniversary year.
A special Kennedy Space Center Up-Close Tour has been extended until the end of 2012 to allow visitors a look inside the 525ft-tall Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), where the Apollo rockets and Space Shuttles were assembled.

Alien Earth: What It Will Mean to Find Our Planet's Twin

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Finding Earth 2.0 is just a matter of time, and the discovery will likely transform the way we think about our place in the cosmos, astronomer Natalie Batalha said Tuesday (Jan. 8).
Batalha is a co-investigator for NASA's Kepler telescope, a planet-hunting mission that has uncovered 2,740 potential alien worlds in just the few years since its 2009 launch. Though Kepler has found some Earth-size planets, and others in the habitable zones around their stars that could allow them to harbor liquid water, none of them are true Earth twins. But that's likely soon to come.

Sizes of Planets

Zombie Planet

 

The unbalanced orbit of a so-called "zombie planet" in a dusty star system has astronomers struggling to explain the exoplanet's behavior.
New observations of the planet Fomalhaut b by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the oddball orbit, which has wild extremes between its closest and farthest points from the parent star and appears to cross through a vast minefield of dusty debris. 
"We are shocked. This is not what we expected," said study leader Paul Kalas, an astronomer with the University of California at Berkeley and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif..

Finding Alien

Finding Alien Earths, A Near-Miss by Asteroid Apophis and Could Space Make You Taller?

Last week scientists said finding an alien Earth is likely, we found out asteroid Apophis will just miss our planet when it zooms by and the largest structure in space was discovered. See the top stories of the last week here. FIRST STOP: Strange But True: Astronauts Get Taller in Space