Guardians of the Galaxy HD sci-fi and Fantasy Move

The newest trailer for upcoming blockbuster curiosity Guardians of the Galaxycontinues to walk a fine line of publicity, simultaneously offering up a feast for hardcore fans — The Accuser! The Collector! Blue people! — while also making a convincing argument to non-fanboy laypeople that Guardians of the Galaxy is the Gun-Toting Talking-Raccoon movie of the summer.

Most of the broad strokes were covered in February’s trailer, but the new footage features a look at a key character in the movie, plus a sneak peek at some of the deep-space settings. Also: Vin Diesel speaks! And this is the moment when, as a journalist, I am forced to remind you that Vin Diesel is playing a tree.

Watch the full trailer here — and now let’s dive in, shall we?

Jupiter icy moon Europa spouts water | NASA Science reporters

Water may be spouting from Jupiter's icy moon Europa - considered one of the best places to find alien life in the Solar System.

Images by the Hubble Space Telescope show surpluses of hydrogen and oxygen in the moon's southern hemisphere, say astronomers writing in Science journal.

If confirmed as water vapour plumes, it raises hopes that Europa's underground ocean can be accessed from its surface.

Future missions could probe these seas for signs of life.

Nasa's planetary science chief Dr James Green told that: "The presence of the water has led scientists to speculate that the Europa we know today harbours life.

"The plumes are incredibly exciting if they are there - they are bringing up material from the ocean. Perhaps there are organic molecules lying there on the surface of Europa."

The findings were reported at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco, California.

Scientists discovered the enormous fountains in images taken by Hubble in November and December of last year, as well as older images from 1999.

Signatures of water (blue) detected by Hubble are overlayed on an image of Europa

They saw evidence of water being broken apart into hydrogen and oxygen over the south polar regions of Europa.

"They are consistent with two 200-km-high (125 mile-high) plumes of water vapour," said lead author Lorenz Roth, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

Every second, seven tonnes of material is ejected from the moon's surface.

Dr Kurt Retherford, also of the Southwest Research Institute, told the AGU meeting: "This is just an amazing amount.

"It is travelling at 700m a second... All of this gas comes out, and almost all falls back towards the surface - it doesn't escape out into space."

These plumes appear to be transient - they arise for just seven hours at a time.

They peak when Europa is at its farthest from Jupiter (the apocentre of its orbit) and vanish when it comes closest (the pericentre).

This means that tidal acceleration could be driving water spouting - by opening cracks in the surface ice, the researchers propose.

The team is not yet sure whether these fissures go all the way down to the liquid water beneath the moon's icy crust, or whether some other mechanism is bringing the vapour to the surface.

The researchers also want to investigate whether the plumes are similar to those seen on Saturn's moon Enceladus, where high-pressure vapour emissions escape from very narrow cracks on the body's surface.

"We have a lot of questions about how this works," said Dr Retherford.

"How thick is the ice crust? Are there lakes and ponds embedded within the layers of the ice? Do these cracks go down really deep, do they really touch the liquid water down below?

"We don't know all of these things."

The team said exploration for Europa should now be made a priority.

The US Space Agency has made some preliminary plans for a mission to the moon - the Europa Clipper, which could fly past the plumes.

However, budgetary constraints mean it may not happen for some time.

Dr Green said: "The Europa Clipper is a very expensive venture. It is expensive because it is designed to last for a fairly long period of time, potentially a year or a number of years in a very harsh radioactive environment.

"So consequently that is what we would call a flagship.

"And right now, the budget horizon is such that we are deferring that kind of mission later into the decade."

The next realistic opportunity to study the jets up close is therefore the European Space Agency's Juice mission.

Due to launch to the Jovian system in 2022, the satellite will make two close flybys of the ice-encrusted moon in the 2030s. With luck, its instrumentation will get close enough to directly sample the plumes.

Dr Retherford, who is also an investigator on a US instrument on Juice, cautioned that the European flybys would go close to the equator, whereas the Hubble data had only seen the plume activity at the southern pole so far: "We have probably observed only one of the largest plumes on Europa.

"There could be a lot of plumes, more like 10-50km high, and we're just not seeing them with our current data-sets. So it's not improbable that the Juice mission could be flying through some sort of plume near the equator, in which case we'd still have a chance to sniff out the composition of the gases coming off and do all sorts of other interesting studies,"

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NEW AND AMAZING SPACE Technology: How to Find Dangerous Asteroids

Searching for potentially Earth-destroying asteroids today isn't easy.
They're dark, difficult to see from the surface of the planet, and there are a lot of them floating in the solar system. Scientists are now looking into new, higher-tech ways to find and track near-Earth objects, but for now, much of the hard work of asteroid tracking is done the old-fashioned way: with a telescope on a clear night.
NASA scientists, astronomers around the world and amateur observers with backyard telescopes devote their lives and free time to seeking out potentially hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs). [Photos: Potentially Dangerous Asteroids]

"It all begins with an observer making observations," Gareth Williams, of the Minor Planet Center, the clearinghouse for asteroid and other minor-planet documentation, told SPACE.com "They can be observing known objects, or they can be searching for new objects, but even if they're searching for known objects — just to take a pretty picture or some reason — new objects can come into the field. About one in 1,000 of these new objects turn out to be an object that's moving anomalously when compared to other objects in the frame."
Hunting asteroids
Anomalous motion — when an object moves in a different way than other bodies in a frame — can signal something to a keen observer. The skywatcher then reports his or her findings to the Minor Planet Center (MPC), located in Cambridge, Mass., and officials with the MPC search the organization's database to try to find a match with known, already-tracked objects.
If the new observation doesn't match any known object, the MPC puts it onto the NEO confirmation page — a database where observers can find information about asteroids with orbits that have not been sufficiently traced.
The MPC functions as the central database for all information about NEOs. The astronomers of the MPC — run by the International Astronomical Union — collect and help verify all of the space-rock sightings that are reported.
An interconnected group of observers and sky surveys work to validate claims of near-Earth-object sightings on a daily basis. This month alone, observers have discovered 80 NEOs out of 656,546 observations.

Europe Launches New Project Space Metal 3D Printing

"We want to build the best quality metal products ever made," David Jarvis, ESA's Head of New Materials and Energy Research, said in a statement when the project was unveiled last week at the London Science Museum.
The group is focusing on making space-quality components by using lasers, electron beams and even plasma to melt metal alloys, Jarvis explained. The project also aims to explore the possibility of combining strong and lightweight, but more exotic metals, such as tungsten, niobium and platinum, though these materials are expensive.
As part of the initiative, four pilot 3D printing-factories are being established in Germany, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom. David wants to help standardize the technique and bring it to the mainstream, connecting key players in the metallic 3D printing business to develop a supply chain.
ESA officials say innovations along the way to make 3D printers more viable for spacecraft could have benefits on Earth, leading to improvements in aircraft wings, jet engines and automotive systems.
ESA is hardly alone in its ambition to perfect metal 3D printing for the final frontier. Among several other NASA endeavors in additive manufacturing, the U.S. space agency recently completed a successful hot-fire test of the biggest 3D-printed rocket part built to date: an engine injector printed with nickel-chromium alloy powder.
There are several private and university-led efforts, too. Earlier this month, a group of students at the University of California, San Diego performed their first test of a 3D-printed engine made from cobalt chromium.