NASA UFO Photos Released
These are all screengrabs from a series of photos of unidentified objects shot by an astronaut in Earth's orbit, and were published on a NASA website :













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Breathtaking. A recent view of the Earth and the International Space Station as seen from the space shuttle Endeavour

The World's Most Expensive Toilet - $19 Million

Did someone forget to put enough toilets in the International Space Station? Sure sounds like it. NASA is now going to spend some $19 million buying a space toilet from the Russians :

The new toilet will go on the International Space Station, which currently has a crew of three, and only one toilet. The crew will expand to six members in 2009, and space bosses don't want astronauts lining up when they have to go.

The new toilet will be similar to the existing toilet (also Russian-built), which has been in orbit since late 2000, 1.6 billion kilometres ago, and is still flushing.

Actually, space toilets don't really flush, because that would waste water. They use vacuum instead.

Since supplies are difficult and expensive to deliver, the space station (like the Russian Mir station before it) has to get along with very little fresh water. It is in such short supply that astronauts use no-rinse shampoo and edible toothpaste so they don't have to rinse and spit.

Every few months, a supply ship brings about 450 litres of fresh water. But that's not enough to supply a crew of three.

Instead, the toilet pumps urine to a U.S.-made filtering system. Water molecules are very small, and the filters can remove anything made of bigger molecules -- in particular, the organic waste in urine.

For $19 million, NASA also gets a "privacy enclosure" around the toilet. And like all space toilets, it will have foot straps to keep the user steady.

Yeah, that is one activity in space where you don't want to start floating away.

No rinse shampoo? Why hasn't that, like Velcro, made its way into terra shops?

Nobody Can Explain The Mystery Of The Night-Shining Clouds



They street term is "night-shining" clouds. And it's far more poetic than the scientific term, "noctilucent", for one of the world's greatest, and most beautiful mysteries.

So far, there is no peer-reviewed, or even unanimous, explanation for why high-floating clouds are glowing spectacularly at night, usually coming from out of the Arctic.

There's a few theories - volcanic ash, ice crystals sandwiched between layers of atmosphere, space dust.

But when in doubt of an explanation that makes sense, you can always try this one : climate change.

From Live Science :

The clouds are on the move, brightening and creeping out of polar regions, and researchers don't know why.

"It is clear that these clouds are changing, a sign that a part of our atmosphere is changing and we do not understand how, why or what it means," said atmospheric scientists James Russell III of Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia.

"These observations suggest a connection with global change in the lower atmosphere and could represent an early warning that our Earth environment is being changed."

The clouds form 50 miles above the Earth’s surface, in an upper layer of the atmosphere called the mesosphere. The puffs of water vapor and crystals appear during summer months above the Northern Hemisphere's pole as well the Southern Hemisphere’s pole in summer.

The mysterious clouds aren't new. They were first recorded back in 1885, but weirdly, they are now on the move, spreading further across the planet, through the upper atmosphere, as the decades pass.

Night-shining clouds were observed, and photographed, from the International Space Station back in 2003. Astronauts described them vividly, as visions of immense beauty :

They hover on the edge of space. Thin, wispy clouds, glowing electric blue.

Some scientists think they're seeded by space dust. Others suspect they're a telltale sign of global warming.

A century ago the clouds were confined to latitudes above 50 degrees; you had to go to places like Scandinavia, Russia and Britain to see them. In recent years they have been sighted as far south as Utah and Colorado.

A view of the night-shining clouds from the International Space Station, back in 2003

NASA To Send Robot To Explore Mysterious, Deadly 'Bottomless Pit'



It's the deepest known land pit in the world, and it's already claimed the life of one explorer who dived in to try and discover the secrets that lie at its bottom.

At 925 feet deep, the El Zacaton sinkhole in Mexico remains one of the mysteries of the world. Scientists know little about how the geothermal pit is fed by water, or what creatures live in its deepest, darkest depths.

They hope they can find out by sending a NASA robot where no man has gone before, or at least lived to tell the tale of what he found down there :

NASA, which funded the robotic explorer, views the mission as a test-run for a potential journey to Europa, a moon of Jupiter thought to contain liquid water beneath miles of ice — and possibly complex forms of life. New technologies that could help explore its ocean will be put to the test during the robot's descent.

Software written by Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute will allow the untethered sub to navigate in the sometimes closely confined underwater spaces and probe the pitch-black sinkhole with 56 sonar sensors for mapping.

You can follow the progress of the robot's exploration of the sinkhole via this website.