The massive explosion that took place yesterday on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico has been spotted by NASA’s Aqua satellite.

The Mississippi River Delta is speckled with clouds and outlined by a wide border of greenish-tan sediment. A white outline on the top image indicates the area covered by the close-up view below. (The large image shows a wider area at the same resolution as the close-up view.) The oil platform appears as a white dot, and a fan of brown smoke extends to the southeast.

Although photographs show that the damaged rig was leaking oil, no oil slick is obvious in this image. Oil slicks are notoriously difficult to spot in natural-color (photo-like) satellite imagery because a thin sheen of oil only slightly darkens the already dark blue background of the ocean. Under unique viewing conditions, oil slicks can become visible in photo-like images, but usually, radar imagery is needed to clearly see a spill from space.

Back in 1971, a meteorite fell to the Earth and landed in Finland. Since that time, the rock has been poked and prodded but it didn’t reveal its secrets until recently, when scientists began polishing the rock with a diamond-based paste. Their exploratory analysis soon revealed two entirely new forms of carbon, essentially diamonds that are significantly harder than anything on Earth.

But what apparently happened in the Havero meteorite is that graphite layers were shocked and heated enough to create bonds between the layers — which is exactly how humans manufacture diamonds, Chen explained.

Ferroir’s team took the next step and put the diamond-resistant crystals under the scrutiny of some very rigorous mineralogical analyzing instruments to learn how its atoms are lined up. That allowed them to confirm that they had, indeed, found a new “phase” or polymorph of crystalline carbon as well as a type of diamond that had been predicted to exist decades ago, but had never been found in nature until now.

“The new structure is very interesting,” Chen told Discovery News. “It gives us some clues so we can try to make it in the laboratory, and then investigate it.”

Among the things that would be interesting to learn, Chen said, is how hard are the new kinds of diamonds. The sample from the meteorite was far too small to test for hardness, except to show that it is certainly harder than regular diamonds.

“The only evidence we have for a higher hardness than diamond is the fact that we polished the rock section with a diamond paste and that our polymorph and polytypes were not polished by this material,” said Ferroir. “This why we do think that its hardness is harder than diamond.”

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If you’re looking for a new line of work and have plenty of time ahead of you, then you may want to begin focusing on a career as a Space Pilot. Essentially the future version of an airline pilot, space pilots are set to be in high demand within 20 years, according to a study from the British government.

Potential jobs of the future will include more farmers of genetically engineered crops and livestock, specialists in climate change reversal, and personal branders who will help individuals to establish their own brand across social networking sites.

In addition, it predicts that police officers will be needed to monitor weather manipulation, and electronic waste data managers will be employed by people who do not want to be tracked online.

The report was commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

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The field of Astronomy delivered a ton of amazing photos in 2009 and 2010 is shaping up to be even better, thanks to a fleet of new spacecraft and telescopes that will soon be revealing new wonders and mysteries. There is no one better to judge a top 10 than Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy, a man who has been fighting the good fight against conspiracy theorists, anti-vaccine wackos and anti-evolution nut-cases.

His pick for #1 is excellent, as it shoves the long-standing We Never Went to the Moon conspiracy theory right into the face of gullible idiots. Why? It reveals the actual equipment Apollo astronauts left behind on the surface of the moon: