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Do you have what it takes to be an ASTEROID HUNTER? Nasa offers £20,000 reward for software that could save planet

Posted on March 12, 2014 by ankakh

The world’s leading space agency is looking for asteroid hunters to help save the planet – and you could help.

Nasa is offering up to $35,000 (£21,000) over the next six months to anyone who is able develop computer code that can identify life-threatening asteroids.

By mining talent from the general public, the space agency hopes to spot dangerous space rocks such as the one that saw off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Over the past two decades, Nasa has been looking for dangerous near-Earth asteroids larger than 1km in size, and claims to have found 98 per cent of them.

But existing asteroid detection systems can only track one per cent of the estimated objects that orbit the sun, according to asteroid mining firm Planetary Resources, who is partnering with Nasa on the project.

Currently there are only around 100 people who tracks asteroids each day to determine their shape and speed.

Nasa wants to increase that number, particularly over Africa and Asia where spottings aren’t being made.

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NASA discovers 715 new planets

Posted on February 27, 2014 by ankakh

Our galactic neighborhood just got a lot bigger. NASA on Wednesday announced the discovery of 715 new planets, by far the biggest batch of planets ever unveiled at once.

By way of comparison, about 1,000 planets total had been identified in our galaxy before Wednesday.

Four of those planets are in what NASA calls the “habitable zone,” meaning they have the makeup to potentially support life.

The planets, which orbit 305 different stars, were discovered by the Kepler space telescope and were verified using a new technique that scientists expect to make new planetary discoveries more frequent and more detailed.

NASA says 95% of the planets discovered by Kepler are smaller than Neptune, which is four times as big as Earth.

One of them is about twice the size of Earth and orbits a star half the size of Earth’s sun in a 30-day cycle.

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Room with a view: NASA releases the best photos of Earth taken from space this year

Posted on December 28, 2013 by ankakh

When it comes to a room with a view, one several hundred miles above earth is hard to beat.

Satellites orbiting the planet and astronauts aboard the International Space Station often take pictures of volcano eruptions, hurricanes and other examples of nature’s fury.

And now NASA has rounded up the most spectacular images taken from space all year.

The images also include some of the most beautiful sights our planet has to offer – from Princess Charlotte Bay, in Australia, to the surprising beauty of Reno, Nevada’s city lights set against the mountains that surround it.

A picture was captured just weeks ago of a new island forming in the Pacific.