But for some reason, this stunning new version of the “Blue Marble” photo of Earth — taken on Jan. 4 by the Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite instrument on NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite — is vaguely comforting.

Perhaps because it speaks of a much bigger picture, and of how delicately and elegantly life hangs in the dark universe.

All via an amazing piece of tech, the Suomi NPP, which NASA said is the “first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth.”

Enjoy:

(Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring)

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were intended to explore the outer solar system — a task they competed in 1989. Voyager 1 crossed into the outermost layer of the heliosphere, called the “heliosheath,” in 2004. (The heliosheath is marked by slower solar winds, due to the proximity of interstellar gas.)

Today, Voyager 1 may be only a few hundred million to a billion miles away from the edge of the solar system. It now travels one billion miles every three years, and is currently 11 billion miles away from the sun.

You can get the backstory and more detail from a great NPR “Morning Edition” interview with NASA’s Ed Stone, who has been Voyager’s lead scientist since 1972.

Stone notes that Voyager’s onboard computers have only 8,000 words of memory, with a 23-watt transmitter, much less than modern devices have. With such old and basic equipment, it’s the battery life that’s impressive — based on the decay of Plutonium-238, there will be enough power for some of the scientific instruments on board until 2025.

(Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Late yesterday, NASA announced the discovery of a planet just outside our solar system that is the most like Earth to be found so far.

Located using the Kepler universe-trotting telescope, the planet that has been named the poetic Kepler 22-b is a balmy 72 degrees.

That’s because it is in a habitable “Goldilocks” zone (see chart below) and seems to circle a sun much like our own.

Yes, I am hoping this Earth 2.0 is just like Counter-Earth from the comics, too.

But, at more than twice the size of Earth, it is likely all ocean and rock and gas at this point, and is more than 600 light years away. So, if any geek is planning a star trek, it will take a lot of rocket fuel.

(Photos courtesy of NASA)

But you can also deliver messages that are literally out of this world. Here’s one NASA’s Ron Garan beamed to earth yesterday from his perch in the International Space Station.

His caption: “This is what the Moon looked like 16 times today #FromSpace We had simultaneous sunsets + moonsets”

It’s a big win for HP, no question, though it comes at a time when NASA’s mission is in a bit of flux. The Space Shuttle program is winding down after three decades, and at least for a few years, the U.S. won’t be sending any astronauts into space, at least not on government-issue spacecraft. The final flight of Space Shuttle Endeavor is scheduled for tomorrow, and then the final flight of Atlantis is on track for June. And that will close the Shuttle era.

As it happens, HP’s announcement of its contract with NASA coincides with a media briefing expected today about the next stage in manned space flight, sponsored by the private sector. Last week the agency handed out $269 million in seed money to several companies, including the aerospace giant Boeing and SpaceX, the private space outfit founded by PayPal founder Elon Musk. The plan is to have private contractors take over the job of sending astronauts to the International Space Station, though that will take a few years. In the meantime, astronauts will be hitching a ride on Russian spacecraft at a cost of $63 million a shot.

Whatever the outcome, though, I guess this means that when you see TV shots of Mission Control in Houston, the computer screens they’ll be looking at will have HP logos on them.

Remember how IBM recently said at its analyst meeting that projects related to its Smarter Planet initiative will drive $10 billion in revenue by 2015? It also promised to spend $20 billion on software acquisitions over the next five years. This is one of the deals that Big Blue says will help get it there. IDC has pegged the worldwide market for smart buildings at $3.9 billion this year.

Tririga specializes in software that helps its clients get the most out of their real estate portfolio, run capital projects efficiently and manage energy usage inside buildings. Its customers include Nokia, General Electric, NASA and The U.S. Department of Defense.

When you consider that, for large companies, real estate and facilities costs are usually the second-highest line item after salaries and benefits and can account for 30 percent of annual expenses, it makes sense to get into a business that aims to help them keep those costs under control. IBM shares rose 22 cents to 157.90 on the news.

Anso Labs is helmed by Jesse Andrews, the former lead architect at Flock, the Web-browser company that was recently acquired by Zynga, and Soo Choi, a former exec at Booz Allen Hamilton. Anso Labs is best known for its work on the cloud computing front with NASA, the U.S. space agency.

The move takes place against the backdrop of a surge in consolidation in the cloud computing and data center business. Last week, Time Warner Cable dropped $230 million for NaviSite. And on Jan. 28, Verizon acquired Terremark for $1.4 billion. That one-two punch in data center deal-making has led to persistent speculation that other data center companies, Rackspace among them, will be rolled up by larger companies–like Hewlett-Packard, Dell or Cisco Systems–that are eager to add cloud services to their portfolio.

Ask Rackspace executives about this–and I have–and they’ll tell you they’re not thinking about that. Rather than being rolled up by someone else, they’re focused on rolling up the assets they want to grow, and to remain independent. Late last year Rackspace acquired Cloudkick, a start-up focused on building cloud monitoring tools.

Rackspace did $629 million in revenue in 2009, and is expected to show annual sales of about $775 million when it reports fourth-quarter earnings tomorrow. It has 100,000 customers, and while many of them are small- and medium-size businesses, larger enterprise customers like Coca-Cola, Target and Vodaphone are tapping Rackspace for Web hosting and to run their cloud applications.

Rackspace wants Anso Labs for its expertise and devotion to OpenStack, an open-source cloud computing software project backed by Rackspace, Dell, Citrix, Cisco and Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu flavor of Linux.

Rackspace wants to create a bunch of inter-operable cloud services so that customers can move workload from one cloud service provider to another at will, giving them increased flexibility. It’s comparable in some ways to vCloud from VMware and Eucalyptus.

Powering the Tianhe-1A are some three million processing cores from Nvidia, the Silicon Valley company that has sold hundreds of millions of graphics chips for videogames. That’s right—every time someone fires up a videogame like Call of Duty or World of Warcraft, the state of the art in technology advances. Hug a geek today.

What a switch. For centuries, the military has driven technology forward, fostering new waves of industrialization and corporate use. James Watt’s steam engine was perfected with the help of a cannon-boring tool. Computers were created during World War II to calculate artillery firing and to break codes. The military bought half of all semiconductors until the late 1960s. Even the first global-positioning systems (GPS) were funded by Congress, not for navigation but as a nuclear detonation detection system. Add microwave ovens from radar, Blu-ray discs from lasers, or Velcro and Tang from NASA, and there’s no doubt how much government acquisition programs have shaped our lives.

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Google (GOOG), which helped provide maps and people-finder tools after the earthquake in Haiti, has set up a site dedicated to the oil spill that combines data from Louisiana’s government as well as NASA and state non-profit organizations to provide a map of the oil slick and its effects.

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“What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue,” researcher Mark Post told the Sunday Times. “We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there.” If Post and his colleagues are able to do that, we may end up with an environmentally friendly meat that reduces the impact of food production. Said Post, “You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals.”

Vladimir Mironov, a tissue engineer at the Medical University of South Carolina, envisions a day when we use countertop bioreactors to make our meat–steaks and chops with nutritional profiles that we have predetermined. “It would look like a coffee maker,” Mironov said back in 2007. “This is my dream.”

Sadly for Mironov, he wasn’t able to find funding. NASA turned down his request for a grant, and the lone group that did express interest in his work, taking the you-are-what-you-eat philosophy full circle, was interested in meat cultured from its members’ own cells. Mironov declined to identify that particular…diners’ club, but said, “I don’t want to participate in high-tech human cannibalism.”

With the presence of water on the planet confirmed, NASA has decided to extend the Phoenix Lander’s 90-day mission by five weeks. “We have lots more to explore within reach of our robotic arm,” said Peter Smith, Phoenix’s principal investigator from the University of Arizona at Tucson. Michael Meyer, chief scientist of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA, added, “We’ve gotten to the point where we’re pretty sure we found water, and determined it was H₂O. One of the things (with upcoming missions will be) moving away from finding water to a search for life.”

[Image credit: Ellen Roper]

With the presence of water on the planet confirmed, NASA has decided to extend the Phoenix Lander’s 90-day mission by five weeks. “We have lots more to explore within reach of our robotic arm,” said Peter Smith, Phoenix’s principal investigator from the University of Arizona at Tucson. Michael Meyer, chief scientist of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA, added, “We’ve gotten to the point where we’re pretty sure we found water, and determined it was H₂O. One of the things (with upcoming missions will be) moving away from finding water to a search for life.”

[Image credit: Ellen Roper]

In a report entitled “U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning,” Lindsay argues that Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN) will someday rule the Internet–more than they already do, that is. “We expect two players to continue to perform strongly, Google and Amazon,” Lindsay writes in the report. “Both Google and Amazon.com are still racking up annual growth rates in the 30% to 40% range, with only a relatively modest slowdown in sight.”

Sadly, the same cannot be said for Yahoo (YHOO) and eBay (EBAY), which are destined for consolidation. Yahoo, Lindsay says, will be acquired by Microsoft (MSFT), eBay by a Microsoft-like suitor.

In a report entitled “U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning,” Lindsay argues that Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN) will someday rule the Internet–more than they already do, that is. “We expect two players to continue to perform strongly, Google and Amazon,” Lindsay writes in the report. “Both Google and Amazon.com are still racking up annual growth rates in the 30% to 40% range, with only a relatively modest slowdown in sight.”

Sadly, the same cannot be said for Yahoo (YHOO) and eBay (EBAY), which are destined for consolidation. Yahoo, Lindsay says, will be acquired by Microsoft (MSFT), eBay by a Microsoft-like suitor.

“Send my love to the aliens,” Beatle Paul McCartney said in a statement released by the space agency. “All the best.” Yoko Ono, widow of the Beatle John Lennon, the principal author of “Across the Universe,” also hailed the transmission–in her own special way: “I see that this is the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe,” she said.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are not your typical billionaires. In fact, if you type billionaire into Google, the picture that emerges–fancy cars, private jets, mansions, jewels, supermodel girlfriends–isn’t anything you’d find in the lifestyle of the Google guys. Page drives a Prius, which costs around $21,000. Brin gets around for the most part on in-line skates, and he still lives in a rented apartment.”

–ABC News, 2004

With its onboard hammocks, full-size sofas and California King beds, it’s a wonder Google’s “party plane” has room for scientific instrumentation befitting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but apparently it does. Google and NASA’s Ames Research Center signed a unique deal last month that allows the agency to “regularly collect Earth atmospheric and terrestrial observations in support of science research and analysis” on some of its flights.

In exchange, Google gets to park its customized wide-body Boeing 767-200, as well as its two Gulfstream Vs, on Moffett Field–a NASA-managed airport that is generally closed to private aircraft–for $1.3 million a year. “It was an opportunity for us to defray some of the fixed costs we have to maintain the airfield as well as to have flights of opportunity for our science missions,” Steven Zornetzer, a NASA official, told the New York Times. “It seemed like a win-win situation.”

For Google, certainly, but not for local residents, who’ve long opposed commercial use of the federally owned airfield and who worry that the deal could open Moffett up to other private flights. “The Google flights represent the possibility that the camel’s nose is under the tent, and that NASA is looking at opening up the use of the runways to help pay for it,” said Lenny Siegel, director of the Pacific Studies Center. “The majority of the people in the community are against that. If they are doing science missions, that’s OK. If they are doing it just because they are rich and popular, it is not OK.”

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are not your typical billionaires. In fact, if you type billionaire into Google, the picture that emerges–fancy cars, private jets, mansions, jewels, supermodel girlfriends–isn’t anything you’d find in the lifestyle of the Google guys. Page drives a Prius, which costs around $21,000. Brin gets around for the most part on in-line skates, and he still lives in a rented apartment.”

–ABC News, 2004

With its onboard hammocks, full-size sofas and California King beds, it’s a wonder Google’s “party plane” has room for scientific instrumentation befitting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but apparently it does. Google and NASA’s Ames Research Center signed a unique deal last month that allows the agency to “regularly collect Earth atmospheric and terrestrial observations in support of science research and analysis” on some of its flights.

In exchange, Google gets to park its customized wide-body Boeing 767-200, as well as its two Gulfstream Vs, on Moffett Field–a NASA-managed airport that is generally closed to private aircraft–for $1.3 million a year. “It was an opportunity for us to defray some of the fixed costs we have to maintain the airfield as well as to have flights of opportunity for our science missions,” Steven Zornetzer, a NASA official, told the New York Times. “It seemed like a win-win situation.”

For Google, certainly, but not for local residents, who’ve long opposed commercial use of the federally owned airfield and who worry that the deal could open Moffett up to other private flights. “The Google flights represent the possibility that the camel’s nose is under the tent, and that NASA is looking at opening up the use of the runways to help pay for it,” said Lenny Siegel, director of the Pacific Studies Center. “The majority of the people in the community are against that. If they are doing science missions, that’s OK. If they are doing it just because they are rich and popular, it is not OK.”