Talking about learning more about space, leads me to tell you about a recent discovery by NASA in the last few years and it was about the order our nearest neighbors are in from earth. The list of stars by closest distance to our sun has changed recently, just when we thought they were written in stone. The third and fourth objects were only found last years by the WISE probe. WISE stands for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. One of the systems is binary meaning it has two stars. These objects are cool brown dwarf stars and their discovery has changed the order of our list of nearby stellar objects. They were discovered by Kevin Luhman, who is an astronomer at Penn State University. One object is the coldest ever found outside our solar system and is about three to ten times the mass of Jupiter.

A former astronaut made a statement which shows how disgusted he is with the way the space program is being run. Walt Cunningham, the former Lunar Module pilot on the Apollo 7 mission was quoted by the International Business Times, web edition, as saying words to the effect President Obama was not interested in space exploration. He was said to have told El Mundo a Spanish newspaper we should be going to Mars, but we are not doing enough to achieve this goal. You can imagine how frustrated an astronaut from the Apollo days must feel. When we started our quest to land on the moon everyone thought it wouldn’t be long after we landed on it, that we would head for Mars. Watching the years shoot by and seeing nothing to indicate any human activity in space exploration must anger and disappoint all astronauts who are alive today, even if they do not admit it.

NASA has said the shrinking of a large part of the Aral Sea can now be seen and this is the first time in modern history this has happened. They go on to say the eastern basin of the South Aral Sea is now completely dry. The Aral Sea is really a large lake and has filled and contracted before, but nothing like what is happening now. Another NASA geographer stated it was the first time this area completely dried in about 600 years. We are talking about a lake which was the fourth largest in the world in the early 1900s. The shrinking is said to have started in the 1960s and has continued ever since. Experts are now saying not to look for the lake after 2020 because it will be gone by then. The shrinking of the lake has caused harsher weather and much of the surrounding land is now contaminated by chemicals used in farming.

NASA is claiming its telescopes have detected clear skies and steamy water vapor on an exoplanet outside of our solar system. The planet is Neptune sized and this makes it the smallest exoplanet from which molecules have been detected. This was detected by using the three NASA telescopes known as Hubble, Spitzer and Kepler. Here is what one NASA scientist had to say about that, “This discovery is a significant milepost on the road to eventually analyzing the atmospheric composition of smaller, rocky planets more like Earth.” The name of the planet they are talking about is HAT-P-11b and orbits the star HAT-P-11. It is 120 light years distance from us and can be found in the constellation Cygnus.

NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory mission has produced a new state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. Let me tell you how NASA describes this new material. They say “a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a collection of atoms in a dilute gas that have been lowered to extremely cold temperatures and all occupy the same quantum state, in which all of the atoms have the same energy levels.” How cold do things get in this testing, try 200 billionths of 1 nano-Kelvin. NASA has said obtaining this new material was a crucial step in their mission. NASA wants to study ultra-cold quantum gases on the space station and their goal is to get the temperature down to one picokelvin or trillionth of one Kelvin. Good luck with that. When things get that cold, the concepts of solid, liquid and gas go right out the window. I find it ironic lasers are used to cool things down and not heat them up. They are used to optically cool rubidium atoms.

We may not have NASA to resupply our space station, but we have several civilian companies who seem to be up to the task and so far they have done a safer job on their flights than the space shuttle which was far more dangerous. NASA is issuing a RFP or Request for Proposal so it can award more contracts to private companies to resupply the space station and take part in experiments. It is said the contracts will run until 2020 and may be extended for four years after that. NASA has said the space station is vital for our exploration efforts. While this may be true I don’t see any progress in human space exploration what so even since it has been up there. Did we go back to the moon, NO! Did we go to Mars, NO! What is NASA talking about?

A breaking story claims NASA has been receiving radio signals from Comet 67P for over 20 years. The person who released the story is keeping his or her identity secret except for the fact they are connected with the European Space Agency. This person states this is why NASA has spent twelve years building a craft to go to that comet and that it wouldn’t make sense to spend all this money and use up all this time just to look at a simple comet. The whistleblower says it is not only the U.S. which is involved in this exploration of the comet, but the space agencies of the entire world. If this is true, it is quite a revelation, but I do have to wonder if some advanced race is using a comet as a base or has stationed a UFO on it, why they would still be using radio signals. There seems to only be two reasons. The first would be they want us to intercept the signal and the other is we have secretly already sent something to the comet which is radioing back. To make matters even more mysterious it is being said the comet has changed course which is not possible. It also has no ice. Our mission will reach it in November 2014.