Former astronaut Tom Jones on NASA's plan for used space shuttles

NASA's Messenger Spacecraft Releases First Close-Ups of Mercury

Watch this animation to view the Mercury orbit insertion maneuver and the spacecraft’s first orbit around the planet.

NASA's Messenger spacecraft has released its first shots of Mercury -- the first ever taken by a craft in orbit around the innermost planet in our solar system.

The high-res glimpse of the myriad dusty craters on the distant planet is the first tantalizing offering from Messenger, which has sailed into orbit high above the planet’s south pole and reveals Mercury's previously unseen surfaces.

“The entire Messenger team is thrilled that spacecraft and instrument checkout has been proceeding according to plan,” said Sean Solomon, Messenger's principal investigator from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. 

“The first images from orbit and the first measurements from Messenger’s other payload instruments are only the opening trickle of the flood of new information that we can expect over the coming year. The orbital exploration of the Solar System’s innermost planet has begun,” he said.

The very first image taken by Messenger from orbit revealed a large rayed crater called Debussy, as well as a smaller crater called Matabei. The bottom portion of the image show Mercury's south pole and includes a region of Mercury's surface not previously seen by spacecraft.

Other pictures released by the space agency show a pock-marked planet remarkably similar to the moon, scarred by the impact of countless asteroids and other space rocks regularly pelting Mercury at high speeds, scientists said.

Mission chief scientist Sean Solomon said that what is surprising to scientists so far is that there are more secondary craters than expected. Those are craters created by the falling soil kicked up from space rock collisions.

Solomon said the craters look different from those on the moon because the space rocks are moving faster and hit Mercury harder.

On March 17, Messenger became the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury. In the course of the $446 million probe's one-year primary mission, the spacecraft's seven scientific instruments and radio science investigation will unravel the history and evolution of the Solar System's innermost planet.

The spacecraft is in an tight orbit that brings it within 124 miles of Mercury at the closest point -- and takes it out more than 9,300 miles away at the farthest point.

NASA and the Messenger team will release additional photos over the next few days -- the spacecraft is set to photograph 1,185 images over a three day period, the agency said.

While Messenger is the first mission ever to orbit around Mercury, it is not the first spacecraft to visit the planet. NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft flew by the planet three times in the mid-1970s.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/03/30/nasa-spacecraft-releases-pics-mercury/#ixzz1I7bXiyc8

NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite

Dr. Riccardo Guerrero / Journal of Cosmology

A photograph taken through a scanning electron microscope of a CI1 meteorite is similar in size and overall structure to the giant bacterium Titanospirillum velox, an organism found here on planet Earth, a NASA scientist said.

We are not alone in the universe -- and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought.

That's the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.

Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites -- only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.

Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover has become convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites -- and by extension, suggest we are not alone in the universe.

“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. “This field of study has just barely been touched -- because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.”

In what he calls “a very simple process,” Dr. Hoover fractured the meteorite stones under a sterile environment before examining the freshly broken surface with the standard tools of the scientist: a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to search the stone’s surface for evidence of fossilized remains.

He found the fossilized remains of micro-organisms not so different from ordinary ones found underfoot -- here on earth, that is.

“The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. But not all of them. “There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stumped.”

Other scientists tell FoxNews.com the implications of this research are shocking, describing the findings variously as profound, very important and extraordinary. But Dr. David Marais, an astrobiologist with NASA’s AMES Research Center, says he’s very cautious about jumping onto the bandwagon.

These kinds of claims have been made before, he noted -- and found to be false.

“It’s an extraordinary claim, and thus I’ll need extraordinary evidence,” Marais said.

Knowing that the study will be controversial, the journal invited members of the scientific community to analyze the results and to write critical commentaries ahead of time. Though none are online yet, those comments will be posted alongside the article, said Dr. Rudy Schild, a scientist with the Harvard-Smithsonian's Center for Astrophysics and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cosmology.

"Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5,000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis," Schild wrote in an editor's note along with the article. "No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting, and never before in the history of science has the scientific community been given the opportunity to critically analyze an important research paper before it is published, he wrote."

Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, said there is a lot of hesitancy to believe such proclamations. If true, the implications would be far-reaching throughout the fields of science and astronomy, the suggestions and possibilities stunning.

“Maybe life was seeded on earth -- it developed on comets for example, and just landed here when these things were hitting the very early Earth,” Shostak speculated. “It would suggest, well, life didn’t really begin on the Earth, it began as the solar system was forming.”

Hesitancy to believe new claims is something common and necessary to the field of science, Hoover said.

“A lot of times it takes a long time before scientists start changing their mind as to what is valid and what is not. I’m sure there will be many many scientists that will be very skeptical and that’s OK.”

Until Hoover’s research can be independently verified, Marais said, the findings should be considered “a potential signature of life.” Scientists, he said, will now take the research to the next level of scrutiny, which includes an independent confirmation of the results by another lab, before the findings can be classified “a confirmed signature of life.”

Hoover says he isn’t worried about the process and is open to any other explanations.

“If someone can explain how it is possible to have a biological remain that has no nitrogen, or nitrogen below the detect ability limits that I have, in a time period as short as 150 years, then I would be very interested in hearing that."

"I’ve talked with many scientists about this and no one has been able to explain,” he said.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/03/05/exclusive-nasa-scientists-claims-evidence-alien-life-meteorite/#ixzz1FjJ3PlD6