NASA releases dramatic new Pluto images

NASA has released more stunning images from New Horizons’ historic flyby of Pluto, which show icy mountains, fog, and the dwarf planet’s landscape dramatically backlit by the sun.

The images, released Thursday, were taken on July 14 and downlinked to Earth on Sept. 13.

Related: New Horizons spacecraft makes historic Pluto flyby

NASA released the first images from New Horizons’ Pluto flyby in July. The spacecraft began its yearlong download of new images and other data over the Labor Day weekend.

Related: NASA releases first Pluto flyby images

Thanks to favorable backlighting and high resolution, an image taken by New Horizons' Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) also reveals new details of hazes throughout Pluto’s nitrogen atmosphere. The image shows more than a dozen thin haze layers extending from near the ground to at least 60 miles above the dwarf planet's surface, according to NASA. 

"In addition to being visually stunning, these low-lying hazes hint at the weather changing from day to day on Pluto, just like it does here on Earth," said Will Grundy, lead of the New Horizons Composition team from Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Ariz., in a statement released by NASA.

Earlier this month NASA released images showing Pluto's stunning range of surface features, from heavily cratered terrain to icy plains.

Launched in 2006, New Horizons passed by Jupiter in 2007 on its journey to Pluto. The fastest spacecraft ever, the probe traveled at 30,000 mph on its epic trip.

European astronaut uses 'the Force' to control rover from space

Demonstrating one small step for rover operations, a European astronaut successfully maneuvered a machine on Earth in precision operations from his perch 248 miles high on the International Space Station.

Sept. 7, the European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Andreas Mogensen helped demonstrate the first "force feedback" using a rover controlled from space. With the help of a system that let him feel forces pressing against the rover's arm, Mogensen remotely inserted a small, round peg into a "task board" that offered just a fraction of a millimeter of clearance.

"Andreas managed two complete drive, approach, park and peg-in-hole insertions, demonstrating precision force-feedback from orbit for the very first time in the history of spaceflight," experiment leader André Schiele of ESA's Telerobotics and Haptics Laboratory said in a statement. [Video: Space-Borne Astronaut Runs Robot On Earth]

"He had never operated the rover before, but its controls turned out to be very intuitive," Schiele said in the statement. "Andreas took 45 minutes to reach the task board and then insert the pin on his first attempt, and less than 10 minutes on his follow-up attempt, showing a very steep learning curve."

Clever engineering allowed the astronaut to "feel" his way around the hole despite there being a 1-second delay between his movements and what was happening on the ground. The team — which included members from the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) and graduate students from Delft University of Technology, both in the Netherlands — created software models to compensate for the lag.

The signal from the space station has to pass through several obstacles before reaching ESTEC and the waiting rover. After leaving the station, the signal goes to satellites in geosynchronous orbit roughly 22,300 miles high, beams to a ground station in New Mexico (via NASA's Johnson Space Center) and then travels to ESTEC via a transatlantic cable. 

By the time the signal gets back from the International Space Station, the round-trip is more than 89,000 miles, the equivalent of nearly halfway to the moon.

Besides placing a peg in a hole, Mogensen also evaluated the stiffness of different springs on the joystick to figure out the appropriate sensitivity for the device. 

The experiment, called Interact, is intended to pioneer remote-control operations from space. As astronauts expand exploration across the solar system, someday this technology could be used for lunar bases or exploring Mars, ESA officials added.

Elon Musk's answer to making Mars more like Earth? Just nuke it

It hasn't even been a week since Stephen Colbert started hosting CBS' The Late Show, and already, he's getting his guests to make some pretty spectacular claims. Oprah may have watched Tom Cruise jump on a couch, but Colbert got Elon Musk to advance a decidedly gasp-worthy theory about how best to make Mars a more hospitable environment for human life. "The fast way is to drop nuclear weapons over the poles," the Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal founder told Colbert. To which the host responded, "You're a supervillain!"

Or Ironman, but you know, same difference.

Describing Mars as "a fixer upper of a planet," Musk noted that the main problem with our red neighbor is that it's too cold for inhabitation. But, he noted, it can be made to more closely resemble Earth if we just warm it up. "There's the fast way and the slow way," Musk said, with the slow way being the gradual release of greenhouse gasses, which are famous on Earth for causing global warming and climate change.

Related: NASA will isolate 6 researchers in a dome for a year to simulate a Mars mission

But the flashier, more exciting way (and let's face it, the more Elon Musk way), is to drop nuclear bombs on the planet, because nothing screams warmth like thermonuclear weapons. Unfortunately, Musk didn't get to elaborate much further on how exactly this plan would pan out, but it's certainly a novel idea. And considering that his last few SpaceX rocket landings have resulted in explosions of their own, maybe Musk can jumpstart this warming process by sending his spacecraft to Mars.

Of course, the viability of such a plan is probably a bit more questionable than say, bringing frozen methane to Mars from neighboring planets or moons, or better yet, bringing cyanobacteria and algae that are capable of producing oxygen to the Red Planet. But then again, many of Musk's ideas have seemed outlandish at first blush, and he's only ever proved the haters wrong.

So keep this Late Show prediction in the back of your minds, folks. We may just be exploding nukes on Mars someday. Better there than here.

Space Station crosses Sun's face in spectacular new photo

An amazing new photo shows the International Space Station crossing the sun's face.

The picture, a composite of five images taken Sept. 6 from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia by NASA photographer Bill Ingalls, captures a "transit" of theInternational Space Station (ISS) across the solar disk.

Such transits don't last very long, because the space station zooms around Earth at more than 17,000 mph — the $100 billion complex completes one lap around our planet once every 90 minutes or so.

Transits can offer more than just aesthetic appeal. For example, in the 18th century, astronomers were able to calculate the distance from the Earth to the sun by carefully observing two transits of Venus across the sun's face (one in 1761 and the other in 1769) from various locations around the globe. And NASA's Kepler space telescope has spotted thousands of potential exoplanets by detecting the tiny brightness dips they cause when crossing in front of their stars from the observatory's perspective.

The ISS is currently staffed by nine space fliers. But three of them — cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, Denmark's Andreas Mogensen and Kazakhstan's Aidyn Aimbetov — will come back to Earth Saturday (Sept. 12), returning the orbiting lab to its normal complement of six crewmembers.

Step inside Crew Dragon: SpaceX reveals interior of crewed space capsule

SpaceX has thrown open the hatch to its Crew Dragon spacecraft, revealing a sleek black and white interior for the capsule it is building to fly astronauts to the International Space Station and other destinations.

"Step inside Crew Dragon," SpaceX invited on a new page of its website on Sept. 10.

"Dragon made history in 2012 when it became the first commercial [uncrewed] spacecraft to deliver cargo to the space station," SpaceX wrote on its website. "But Dragon was also designed from the beginning to carry people, and today SpaceX is finalizing the necessary refinements to make that a reality." [Take a Video Tour Inside SpaceX's Crew Dragon Spacecraft]

Images and video newly-released by the company show that the tan leather and mirrored metal surfaces previously unveiled as part of Crew Dragon's debut in May 2014 have now been replaced by black bucket seats and stark white walls.

"Crew Dragon was designed to be an enjoyable ride. With four windows, passengers can take in views of Earth, the Moon, and the wider Solar System right from their seats, which are made from the highest-grade carbon fiber and Alcantara cloth," SpaceX described.

The spacecraft's only punch of color — other than from its windows — is from the flat panel displays of the capsule's forward-mounted control panel.

"Crew Dragon's displays will provide real-time information on the state of the spacecraft's capabilities, anything from Dragon's position in space, to possible destinations, to the environment on board," SpaceX stated.

The Crew Dragon's environmental control and life support system will "provide a comfortable and safe environment" for its passengers, added the Hawthorne, California-based company. "During their trip, astronauts on board can set the spacecraft's interior temperature to between 65 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit."

The fully autonomous Crew Dragon is one of two privately designed spacecraft NASA has contracted to begin flying its astronauts to the space station beginning in 2017. The other, Boeing's CST-100 Starliner, is also equipped with a primarily black and white cabin, punctuated by the glow of "Boeing Sky Interior" blue LED lighting, as the aerospace company has deployed on its passenger jetliners.

SpaceX, which earlier this year tested the Crew Dragon's emergency escape system, is planning another abort test in 2017, preceded by a test flight without astronauts to the space station. The company's first Crew Dragon to fly with NASA astronauts aboard will follow the in-flight abort test, prior to SpaceX starting to fly operational missions to the orbiting outpost in the next two to three years.

This photo of Saturn's moon Dione crossing the planet is simply jaw-dropping

An icy moon of Saturn hangs against the face of its giant parent planet in a breathtaking new image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

The photo, which Cassini took on May 21, shows the moon Dione crossing Saturn's disk. Careful study of such "transits" can help astronomers better understand the orbits of Dione and other moons in the solar system, NASA officials said.

Furthermore, NASA's Kepler space telescope and some other instruments hunt for exoplanets by looking for tiny dips in a star's brightness caused by transiting alien worlds. Studying the light coming from such extrasolar systems can also reveal details about the composition of these exoplanets' atmospheres.

At 696 miles in diameter, Dione is the fourth-largest of Saturn's sixty-odd moons; only Titan, Rhea and Iapetus are bigger. Parts of Dione are heavily cratered, and the satellite's trailing side features mysterious ice cliffs and fractures that run for tens or hundreds of kilometers. Cassini has also detected a wispy oxygen atmosphere surrounding the frigid moon.

Cassini snapped the new photo, which was released Aug. 31, when the probe was about 1.4 million miles from Saturn. The image's resolution is 9 miles per pixel.

But Cassini has gotten much closer looks at Dione, thanks to a handful of flybys over the years. During the most recent one, which occurred Aug. 17, the spacecraft zoomed within just 295 miles of the moon's surface, returning a set of amazing images.

The Aug. 17 maneuver was the last scheduled up-close look at Dione, however; no more close flybys are planned before Cassini ends its mission with an intentional death dive into Saturn's thick atmosphere in September 2017.

The $3.2 billion Cassini mission, which launched in 1997 and arrived in the Saturn system in 2004, is a joint operation involving NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.