Anti-Satellite Weapon..Tattoo Mars with corporate logos...Two "supernova factories"

In an effort to raise additional funds, NASA has announced new partnerships with corporate sponsors. It is becoming increasingly difficult for government-backed space agencies to support the vast range of missions currently exploring the solar system, so urgent measures are being taken. Planetary missions in particular, such as the Mars Exploration Rover project, have fallen on tough times. As already demonstrated by research groups in the UK, funds from private companies are essential for survival and some weird and wonderful methods to capture public interest have already been exploited.

Now it is the perfect time for the biggest marketing stunt yet:

tattoo Mars with corporate logos for orbiting spacecraft and ground-based telescopes to observe

Other Mars missions are now being evaluated for their potential marketing skills, and an obvious mission that comes to mind are the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Easier than tattooing the planet from orbit, the rovers could quickly create tire tracks into shapes that can be observed from space.

When asked whether the Phoenix lander had any such capability, Rae commented, "I really wish we'd thought that through better." The lander will only be able to dig crude shapes into the regolith should it be called into fund-raising action. It seems doubtful that sponsors would be interested in this mission which is arriving at the Red Planet in May.

Two “supernova factories,” rare clusters of Red Supergiant (RSG) stars, have recently been discovered. Together they contain 40 RSGs, which is nearly 20% of all the known RSGs in the Milky Way, and all 40 are on the brink of going supernova. “RSGs represent the final brief stage in a massive star’s lifecycle before it goes supernova,” said Dr. Ben Davies of the Rochester (New York) Institute of Technology. “They are very rare objects, so to find this many in the same place is remarkable.”

We're polluting every corner of our own planet, so it only makes sense that we'll take our trashy habits out into space with us. This week we look at the myriad of ways we're messing up space, from the trash orbiting the planet to the radiation we're leaking out into space.

Click here to download the episode

Space Junk - Show notes and transcript

Astronomers Find the Smallest Black Hole

Just as humans develop and grow the fastest when we are young, it also appears our universe grew and developed stars at an incredibly fast rate when it was young, too. New measurements from some of the most distant galaxies helps support evidence that the strongest burst of star formation in the history of the universe occurred about two billion years after the Big Bang.

An international team of astronomers from the UK, France, Germany and the USA have found evidence for a dramatic surge in star birth in a newly discovered population of massive galaxies.

The astronomers have been studying five specific galaxies that are forming stars at an incredible rate. The galaxies also have large reservoirs of gas to power star formation for hundreds of millions of years.

These galaxies are so distant that the light we detect from them has been travelling for more than 10 billion years, meaning we see them as they were about a three billion years after the Big Bang.

Solar Corona Revealed by Medical X-Ray Techniques