Saturn 's moon Enceladus is only 505 kilometers (314 miles) across. It's small enough to fit within the length of the United Kingdom. The intriguing icy moon also could fit comfortably within the states of Arizona or Colorado. The Cassini -Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. Cassini spacecraft has capture this image during a close pass by by the enigmatic moon. via io9 source NASA

A 20 million ton asteroid is currently hurtling through space at 23,000 miles per hour, on a collision course with Earth. But fear not – Nasa has 25 years to stop it. An illustration of asteroid Apophis nearing Earth. NASA officials insist that, contrary to the dire fears of Russian scientists, Apophis will not hit our planet in 2036. When Paul Chodas and Steve Chesley arrived at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a valley beneath the slopes of California’s San Gabriel Mountains, on October 6 2008, they assumed it would be a normal day. But it would prove to be anything but. The scientists worked for the space administration’s Near Earth Object (NEO) programme, a team tasked with identifying comets, asteroids and meteors that potentially pose a threat to Earth. A normal day meant scanning their screens for small white dots in our solar system — the vast majority of which were either too far away to ever be a problem or so small they would burn up in our atmosphere long before they could ever do any serious damage. On that Monday morning, however, Chodas noticed an asteroid about the size of a truck beyond the moon’s orbit. It was on a collision course with Earth. He called Chesley over. The pair estimated the asteroid to be about 5m (16ft) long and they reckoned they had about 19 hours before it hit. Chesley began punching co-ordinates into his machine, trying to compute exactly where it would make contact. “We have software that computes the trajectories and we can run it right through to impact. I pulled out my National Geographic atlas and Steve went on Google to look it up. We both reached the same conclusion: it was going to hit Sudan in the early hours of the following morning, so our next task was to tell Nasa headquarters.” Although there had never been a precedent (this was the first time in human history that Man had been able to foretell an asteroid’s imminent impact with Earth), there were still procedures in place: if Nasa research scientists working on the NEO programme spotted an asteroid that looked like it could come within six Earth radii (about 23,750 miles), they were to notify Nasa’s head office in Washington DC. “From there, it certainly went to the State Department,” Chodas says. “I don’t know all the details, but I’ve heard that it went all the way up to the White House.” Chodas and Chesley worked out the asteroid was heading for the middle of the Nubian Desert. “We knew it was small and we were certain most of it would break up in the Earth’s atmosphere so it didn’t pose a hazard – it would be no more than a shower of rocks on the ground. The closest habitation was something called Station Six, an oil-compressing station with a population of about 10,” Chodas says. “It was basically barren desert.” Just before eight in the evening California time and seven in the morning in Sudan, the captain of a KLM flight some 860 miles south-west of Station Six and 30,000ft up in the air saw a flash in the sky. The asteroid, named 2008 TC3, had just entered the Earth’s atmosphere, and one of the 10 people living at Station Six managed to capture a brief image on their mobile phone of the long trail of smoke as the remnants of the near-Earth object plunged into the sand. Disaster was averted. That time. However, there are plenty more where 2008 TC3 came from and, unfortunately, they are much, much bigger. Earlier this year, news networks around the world warned of a “doomsday asteroid”. Dubbed the “continent killer”, Apophis is a frightening-looking, 250m (820ft)-wide, 20million-ton chunk of rock, ice and dust, pockmarked with craters, which apparently could “land” on Earth, at about 23,000 miles per hour, in 25 years’ time — i.e. in most of our lifetimes. There are two scenarios: the first, and thankfully most likely, is that Apophis will fly by in April 2029, the year it is due to make its first “close approach”, and that’s the last we’ll see or hear of it. The second is that during that approach, it’ll pass through what scientists refer to as a “keyhole” – a small area of space that can alter the asteroid’s course due to Earth’s gravity. If this happens, it’ll be on a massive collision course with us seven years later, likely to be April 13 2036 — Easter Sunday. read more: telegraph Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Those aren't insects trapped in a spider's web -- they're stars in our own Milky Way galaxy, lying between us and another spiral galaxy called IC 342. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured this picture in infrared light, revealing the galaxy's bright patterns of dust. At a distance of about 10 million light-years from Earth, IC 342 is relatively close by galaxy standards. However, our vantage point places it directly behind the disk of our own Milky Way. The intervening dust makes it difficult to see in visible light, but infrared light penetrates this veil easily. While stars in our own galaxy appear as blue/white dots, the blue haze is from IC 342's collective starlight. Red shows the dust structures, which contain clumps of new stars. The center of the galaxy, where one might look for a spider, is actually home to an enormous burst of star formation. To either side of the center, a small bar of dust and gas is helping to fuel the new stars. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu/ and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer jpl.nasa

Tag: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

A Laser Propulsion system could get us to Mars in 3 days!

Imagine getting to Mars in just 3 days! A Laser Propulsion system could make interstellar travel possible.

By Agis F|2017-09-07T10:26:18+03:00Feb 25, 2016|Categories: Space|Tags: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, laser|

Enceladus to Scale

Saturn’s moon Enceladus is only 505 kilometers (314 miles) across. It’s small enough to fit within the length of the United Kingdom. The intriguing icy

By wordlesstech team|2015-07-03T20:45:23+03:00Mar 28, 2013|Categories: Astronomy|Tags: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, moon, saturn|

Obama to NASA: Let me know if you find Martians

President Barack Obama congratulated members of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover team for the “incredibly impressive” mission, at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

By wordlesstech team|2015-06-14T12:06:15+03:00Aug 14, 2012|Categories: Space|Tags: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Red planet|

Curiosity’s Seven Minutes of Terror

In this video by the team members at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, you can see the incredible engineering of the Curiosity Mars rover’s final minutes to

By Agis F|2014-11-02T16:23:38+02:00Jun 24, 2012|Categories: Space|Tags: Curiosity, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, mars, NASA, Red planet, Rover|

Voyage of the Dawn (video)

Dawn is a NASA spacecraft tasked with the exploration and study of the two largest members of the asteroid belt: Vesta and the dwarf planet,

By wordlesstech team|2016-02-07T13:02:53+02:00May 25, 2012|Categories: Astronomy|Tags: dawn, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA, Spacecraft|

Will Asteroid 2011 AG5 hit Earth in 2040? (video)

Asteroid 2011 AG5 has a 1 in 625 chance of hitting Earth on Feb. 5, 2040. So, will this a 140-meter-wide (460 feet) space rock,

By wordlesstech team|2012-03-07T20:07:53+02:00Mar 8, 2012|Categories: Astronomy|Tags: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA|

The mysterious Galactic Haze

New images from the Planck mission show previously undiscovered islands of star formation and a mysterious haze of microwave emissions in our Milky Way galaxy.

By wordlesstech team|2012-02-15T20:34:25+02:00Feb 16, 2012|Categories: Astronomy|Tags: ESA, European Space Agency, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA|

Collision course

A 20 million ton asteroid is currently hurtling through space at 23,000 miles per hour, on a collision course with Earth. But fear not –

By wordlesstech team|2016-08-09T14:07:00+03:00Oct 31, 2011|Categories: Astronomy|Tags: asteroid, Comet, impact, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA|

First complete map of Antarctic Ice Flow (video)

NASA-funded researchers have created the first complete map of the speed and direction of ice flow in Antarctica. The map, which shows glaciers flowing thousands