Nicks News Snippets

New Webb Image Captures Clearest View of Neptune’s Rings in Decades : NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows off its capabilities closer to home with its first image of Neptune.

Nasa's latest update for the launch of the Artemis 1 is that it will be launched on Saturday 3 at 2:17 BST with a two hour launch window.  Weather conditions are set to be favourable with just a few showers expected during the launch window.

The  Artemis space craft  Nasa first attempt in 50 Years to launch a spacecraft to the moon has been postponed due to technical problems due to a cooling problem. The next flight window is Friday

A New study suggest that the grooves on the Phobos moon are stress fractures caused by the gravity from Mars and its Moon reports NASA. This indicates that the moon is slowly being pulled apart slowly

One of NASA'S satellites   DSCOVR  " Deep Space Climate Observatory" captured these pictures that have been made into an animation. The images are of the moon passing earth from the other side. full story   Earthsky.org

The number of spacecraft orbiting Mars has now reached a record of  five and NASA has taken steps to beef up its monitoring and communications to ensure that the craft do not come to close to each other.

Summary of  Global Sea Ice Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Sea ice increases in Antarctica do not make up for the accelerated Arctic sea ice loss of the last decades, a new study finds. As a whole, the planet has been shedding sea ice at an average annual rate of 13,500 square miles (35,000 square kilometers) since 1979, the equivalent of losing an area of sea ice larger than the state of Maryland every year.

  DC=8 Airborne Lab                          Image NASA     NASA has released details of 5 new programs starting in 2015 to see  how long-range air pollution, warming oceans and fires in Africa affect our climate. these are:- Atmospheric chemistry and air pollution Ecosystem changes in a warming ocean Greenhouse gas sources African fires and Atlantic clouds  Melting Greenland glaciers  The study will involve seven NASA  centers  25 education institutions there US Government departments and two private sector partners. For source look Here

The orbit of asteroid 1998 QE2. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech I though this worthy of a mention due to the growing number of near earth misses. The number may be going up due to our ability to detect them but it is worrying all the same. An Asteroid nearly 2 miles across flew passed the earth this week at a safe? distance of 3,600,00 miles. This is not the nearest miss but it is the largest asteroid to miss us. The asteroid is thought to be from the deep space. More can be found on this story here BBC   Sky News   Universe Today   NASA

Image from NASA The link below is the sound of Earth sing like whales  according to NASA as heard from the van Allen belt Earth-chorus-EMFISIS by carlfranzen Star Trek here we go again