In this latest image of Saturn taken by Cassini, you can see several of the storms that rage across the planet's atmosphere. The largest of these storms is 3,000 km across (1,800 miles). There are also light-coloured, lacy cloud patterns that show atmospheric turbulence. This photo was taken on May 7, when Cassini was 28.2 million km (17.5 million miles) away.
Continue reading
A Russian cargo spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station on Thursday, bringing much needed supplies to the astronauts. On board the Progress 14P spacecraft are 2.5 metric tonnes (2.76 tons) of water, food, air, propellant, as well as scientific equipment. The ship also carries a Russian Orlan-M spacesuit, which will replace a malfunctioning US-built one. It will be needed when the astronauts make a spacewalk in June to fix a power control and circuit breaker box for one of the station's four gyroscopes.
Continue reading
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has peered through the dusty haze into the construction zones for new planets and found organic molecules. A team from the University of Rochester surveyed five very young stars in the constellation of Taurus and found these icy organic molecules around all of them. They also found a gap in the planetary disc around a million-year old star, which indicates that a young planet is already forming. This is much earlier than predicted by previous models of planet formation.
Continue reading
Astronomers can measure the reflectivity of the Earth's atmosphere by watching "Earthshine" on the Moon. They found that a gradual dimming of this light from Earth reflected against the Moon matches the warming of the planet's lower atmosphere over the last two decades. The possibility that decreased cloud cover could cause climate change is still controversial, and many scientists are skeptical about this new research. Interestingly, the astronomers who produced this recent study have found that the trend is reversing, with Earthshine increasing again.
Continue reading
It seems that our Milky Way is producing stars much more rapidly than previously predicted by many astronomers. This is according to new research supported by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which was focused on Nebula RCW49. In visible light, there isn't much to see because its heart is shrouded in dust, but in the infrared spectrum, which largely ignores the blocking effect of the dust, astronomers have spotted more than 300 proto-stars in this stellar nursery. And there are many regions like this throughout our galaxy; and probably all galaxies.
Continue reading
As Saturn grows larger in Cassini's camera, scientists have turned many instruments on the ringed planet, including the Hubble Space Telescope. This latest release from Hubble matches up a photo of Saturn taken by the great observatory on May 22 with one taken by Cassini on May 16. It's only Hubble's incredible optics that give it a similar view to Saturn, but that's about to end as Cassini is now only a month away from its destination. The colour differences between the images are due to the different filters used on Hubble and Cassini.
Continue reading
Today's image released by NASA, and taken by its Cassini spacecraft is a close up view of Saturn's rings, and several of its moons: Mimas, Epimetheus, and Enceladus. The image was taken on May 10 with Cassini's narrow angle camera when the spacecraft was 27.1 million kilometres away (16.8 million miles).
Continue reading
In case you haven't seen it with your own eyes yet, here's a 1024x768 desktop wallpaper of Comet NEAT, which is currently fading from the evening sky. The image was taken using the National Optical Astronomy Observatory's 0.9 metre WIYN at Kitt Peak, with the Mosaic I camera. The small star cluster at the lower right of the image is Melotte 72. Comet NEAT was discovered in August 24, 2001 by the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking system managed by NASA's JPL.
Continue reading
An unmanned Soyuz rocket launched a Progress cargo spacecraft towards the International Space Station on Tuesday. It lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome at 1234 UTC (8:34 am EDT), and placed the spacecraft into the proper orbit a few minutes later. Progress 14P is carrying propellant, oxygen, air, and water, as well as 1.2 tonnes of dry cargo, like food and equipment. The spacecraft will reach the station on Thursday.
Continue reading
Quasars are some of the brightest and most distant objects ever observed, and astronomers used to believe they only existed inside giant or disrupted galaxies, with supermassive black holes relentlessly consuming matter at their cores. But new research using the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii shows that they live in some of the more boring galaxies in the Universe. Under the current theories, the powerful twin 8-metre telescopes should have found enormous galaxies in chaos, but they didn't. Only one galaxy could actually be detected, and it wasn't much different from our own Milky Way galaxy.
Continue reading
NASA has released more detailed requirements for its upcoming mission to Jupiter's icy moons. The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter would travel to the Jovian system, and then spend time orbiting Callisto, Ganymede and Europa; each of which might have liquid oceans under their icy surfaces. The mission would be powered by a nuclear reactor, and use ion propulsion to get into and out of various orbits. The Request for Proposal has been delivered to Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, and they have until July 16, 2004 to deliver their conceptual designs.
Continue reading
The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft is scheduled to meet up with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 10 years. It'll get to do some science before then, however, starting with Comet LINEAR, which is 95 million kilometres away (59 million miles). On April 30, Rosetta took a photograph of the comet using its OSIRIS camera system, which was already scheduled for commissioning on that date. Rosetta studied the comet in different wavelengths, from ultraviolet to microwave, and took a high resolution image in blue light.
Continue reading
To celebrate Cassini's arrival at Saturn, the imaging team is going to be releasing a new photograph every day detailing some different aspect of the planet and its moons until the spacecraft enters the system in July. The latest photograph was taken on May 10, and is of swirling bands of turbulent clouds in Saturn's atmosphere. It was taken when Cassini was only 27.2 million km (16.9 million miles) away from the planet.
Continue reading
Astronomers with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have found the heaviest star ever seen - 80 times the mass of our Sun - and it's got a twin. Located 20,000 light-years from Earth, the two massive stars in WR 20a go around each other every 3.7 days. These two stars are very young, probably only 2-3 million years old, and highly unstable. It'll only be a few more million years before they explode, one after the other as supernovas.
Continue reading
It seems that when an asteroid struck the Earth 65 million years ago, the resulting heat pulse incinerated every dinosaur on the planet in just a few hours; only those that were in burrows or underwater likely survived. When the 10 km (6 mile) asteroid hit Chicxulub in the Yucatan, it struck with the force of 100 million megatons of TNT. A new paper published by several US university researchers calculates how ejected material would have heated the atmosphere to the equivalent of a global oven set on broil.
Continue reading
Researchers from Penn State University have developed a computer model that describes the interaction of a binary black hole system; where two black holes orbit one another. Previous models have fallen apart because the gravity of the black holes distorts the surrounding space so dramatically, it's almost impossible to calculate. This unusual situation could generate gravity waves detectable from Earth, which so far have only been theorized by mathematicians.
Continue reading
It's been a month since NASA launched the Gravity Probe B; an experiment designed to test Einstein's predictions about gravity and relativity, and so far, the spacecraft is working well. It's in the correct orbit and will begin the science phase of its mission next month. It will continue taking precise measurements of the Earth's gravity over the next 13 months to test two predictions: how space and time are warped by our planet, and how the Earth drags space-time around with it as it rotates.
Continue reading
The European Space Agency released its official inquiry into the loss of the Beagle 2 lander, and made 19 recommendations for future missions to the surface of the Red Planet. No one has been able to get to the root cause for the loss of Beagle 2's, but it could have been because of a thinner than expected Martian atmosphere, a problem with its airbag system, or a failure to deploy its solar panels, which cover up the lander's main antenna.
Continue reading
The newest photo released by NASA's Cassini spacecraft was taken on May 10, 2004 at a distance of only 27.2 million kilometres (16.9 million miles) using the spacecraft's narrow angle camera. The image shows the translucent C ring and the thin, outermost F ring, which cast a shadow across the clouded atmosphere. Cassini will arrive at Saturn in July, 2004 and begin a long term study of the ringed planet and its moons.
Continue reading
A new theory from researchers at Arizona State University challenges the traditional view of the formation of our Solar System. Instead of forming within an out-of-the-way cloud of interstellar gas and dust, they believe we formed in the intense environment that typically creates more massive stars. The core of their argument is the recent discovery of iron-60 in meteorites; this isotope can only be found in the heart of massive stars. This could mean that the Sun formed while a more massive star was nearby, blasting our environment with intense ultraviolet radiation.
Continue reading
NASA has released fragments from the space shuttle Columbia to a non-government group for the first time since the accident for study. The Aerospace Corporation, in El Segundo, California requested and will receive graphite/epoxy honeycomb skins from several sections of the destroyed spacecraft. The Aerospace Corporation will hold onto the debris for a year, and perform a series of tests to understand the maximum temperatures that it faced during re-entry. Several other "Request for Information" applications are still being considered by NASA.
Continue reading
M82, or the Starburst Galaxy, is one of the most studied galaxies in the night sky. New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has shed light on a cosmic hurricane that lives inside the galaxy, and sends out a stream of particles at more than 1.6 million km/h (1 million mph). These violent winds which go for thousands of light-years above and below the galaxy were caused because of M82's near miss with the neighboring spiral galaxy M81; this set off an explosive burst of star formation.
Continue reading
While searching for near Earth-asteroids, astronomers at Lowell Observatory found an object which orbits closer to the Sun than any other asteroid. Designated 2004 JG6, the asteroid is probably between 500 - 1,000 metres in diameter (1,600 - 3,200 feet) and takes about six months to go around the Sun. Objects like this, which travel within Earth's orbit are called Apoheles, and they're very difficult to discover because they spend so much time near the Sun, invisible to telescopes in the daytime sky. Fortunately, 2004 JG6 poses no threat to Earth.
Continue reading
A team of astronomers led by the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy have found evidence that asteroids change colour as they get older. The team used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which has accurate colour measurements on 100,000 asteroids. They found that asteroids turn redder over time because of the constant bombardment of radiation from the Sun and cosmic rays. With more research, astronomers should soon be able to judge the age of an asteroid just by its colour.
Continue reading
The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) MUSES-C spacecraft snapped pictures of the Earth and Moon as it made a flyby past our planet. The maneuver is called a gravity assist, which uses the Earth's gravity to give the spacecraft a boost in speed. The ion engine powered spacecraft skimmed past our planet at an altitude of only 3700 km before continuing on towards its final target: Asteroid Itokawa (1998SF36). It will reach the asteroid in summer 2005, and then spend 5 months orbiting and collecting samples from its surface. It will then leave the asteroid and return the samples to Earth in 2007.
Continue reading
An Atlas IIAS placed an SES Americom television broadcast satellite into orbit on Wednesday, marking the 72nd consecutive flight for the Atlas family. The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 2222 UTC (6:22 pm EDT), and placed the AMC-11 satellite into a transfer orbit 28 minutes later. This was the second to last launch for the Atlas 2 family of boosters. The final launch will carry a military payload in July.
Continue reading
NASA's Cassini spacecraft turned its gaze on Saturn's mysterious moon Titan again, taking another early look at its haze-obscured surface. The spacecraft was 29.3 million kilometres (18.2 million miles) when it took this picture with its narrow angle camera. Cassini's pictures of Titan are now better than anything that can be taken with Earth-based telescopes. Scientists will get an even better view of Titan when the spacecraft reaches Saturn and its moons in July 2004.
Continue reading
NASA has been working for the past several months to implement the changes requested by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. The Stafford-Covey Task Group released their second interim report today, which tracks the status of the Return to Flight effort. Three of the fifteen recommendations have been completed, and they expect to wrap up several more by the summer. One of the most difficult tasks so far has been to eliminate falling debris during launch - it was a piece of foam that fell off the fuel tank that critically damaged Columbia - engineers are worried that the only way to test if the problem has been fixed is by actually launching the shuttle.
Continue reading
Space tourism company Space Adventures announced on Wednesday that they've completed a deal to send an unnamed Japanese celebrity to the International Space Station. The deal was negotiated with Dentsu, the world's largest advertising agency, which had previously organized a commercial filmed on board the station for Pocari Sweat (a sport drink). Space Adventures has now filled two of its four allocated seats on Soyuz launches over the next few years. The other seat will go to Greg Olsen, who's currently training at Russia's Star City in preparation for his launch as early as October.
Continue reading
When you lock a bunch of humans in a small space for a long time, they can go a little crazy. So researchers from the Australian National University are trying to understand the dynamics that might afflict a long-term space mission, and offer some solutions to make things easier. Volunteers from the Mars Society will travel to the Australian desert, and attempt to mimic some of the conditions experienced by long-duration space travelers. The researchers will test them daily, and watch for detachment, disagreements, and see if the larger group will splinter off into smaller subgroups.
Continue reading
Continue reading
A mysterious force, which astronomers call "Dark Energy", seems to be speeding up the expansion of the Universe. New observations from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have independently confirmed this expansion by measuring the distances to galaxy clusters. It seems that the expansion of the Universe was slowing down after the Big Bang until 6 billion years ago; at that point the force of this dark energy took over and expansion began to speed up. The big mystery still remains... what is dark energy?
Continue reading
Continue reading
If you've ever sat back on a summer's day and wondered, really wondered, what it's all about, then you've likely wandered a bit through time. Perhaps you've thought back to seminal days like the first launch of a rocket, the definition of gravity or perhaps the beginnings of human civilization. Peter Ward in his book Gorgon extends this timeline further, in particular to the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period. Though occurring more than 250 million years ago, Peter brings his investigation and personal events into a warm, thoughtful prose that can add great spice to many a wonder.
Continue reading
NASA is gearing up to launch its next satellite that will monitor the health of the Earth's atmosphere. Aura, which is currently scheduled to lift off on June 19, will carry four instruments designed to survey different aspects of the atmosphere, from the troposphere (where we live) to the high stratosphere. It will help determine the rate at which the ozone layer is recovering, and track the sources and processes that determine global air quality.
Continue reading
Researchers from the University of Arizona have recreated some of the chemicals thought to be in the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. It's unique in the Solar System, with a thick haze of hydrocarbons; some scientists believe it's a similar environment to our own planet's early history. They created these chemicals by bombarding an analog of Titan's atmosphere with electrons, which produces "tholins" (organic polymers). These have been detected from Earth-based telescopes. By dissolving these tholins in liquid water creates amino acids, which are the building blocks for life.
Continue reading
On Tuesday, June 8, observers in Europe, Asia and Africa will be treated to a very rare event in astronomy: a transit of Venus across the surface of the Sun. The transit will begin at approximately 0520 UTC, and wrap up approximately 6 hours later. Don't look directly at the Sun, or through a telescope without a proper filter, as you can severely damage your eyes. The last transit happened on December 6, 1882, and the next will occur in 8 years; it will be visible from the Americas.
Continue reading
NASA's Opportunity rover is hard at work analyzing the rock that was blasted out of the "Endurance" crater. One rock, dubbed "Lion Stone" is unlike any of the others in the region. It was likely formed under wet conditions, like the exposed rock in Eagle Crater (where Opportunity landed), but it's a little different in mineralogy and colour. It might give researchers more conditions about the environment previous to the Eagle Crater rocks. NASA is still deciding whether or not to send the rover into the crater, as it might not be able to climb back out again.
Continue reading
Approximately 250 million years ago, something nearly wiped out life on Earth; 90% of marine animals and 80% of land animals were snuffed out in the geologic blink of an eye. Researchers now believe they've found the culprit: an 8 to 11 km (5 to 7 mile) asteroid that stuck the Earth off the coast of Australia. The impact happened so long ago, there isn't a crater, but geologists have found several clues that lead to this spot, including deposits of "shocked quartz" which can only be formed in a violent event like an asteroid strike.
Continue reading
One of the big goals of astronomy is to answer the question: are we alone? In order to find out the answer, NASA is planning to launch two separate space observatories within the next 10-15 years which will be capable of finding Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. Terrestrial Planet Finder-C will be a moderately sized optical telescope launched by 2014 capable of blocking the glare from a star in order to be able to see planets orbiting it. Planet Finder-I will launch by 2020, and comprise multiple spacecraft flying in formation which will simulate a much larger observatory.
Continue reading
Continue reading
Orbital Recovery has signed a long term contract with Arianespace to launch five of its space tugs as secondary payloads on future Ariane 5 launches. The ConeXpress Orbital Life Extension Vehicles (CX OLEV) will dock with satellites in geostationary orbit which are running out of fuel and take over the process of station keeping, which keeps the satellite in position and pointed at the same spot on the Earth. This will allow satellite operators to continue getting revenue from an otherwise perfectly functioning spacecraft.
Continue reading
European astronomers have found a large disc of dust and gas in nebula M 17, which seems to be forming a huge star, 30-40 times larger than our Sun. Astronomers have long known that low mass stars (like our own Sun) form from discs, but it wasn't clear if huge stars do this too. The disc has 110 times the mass of our Sun, and was seen as a dark silhouette against a hot region of the nebula. The disc has a diameter of 0.31 light-years, which is 500 times larger than the orbit of Pluto.
Continue reading
As Cassini nears Saturn, new details are becoming clearer, including the banded clouds that make up the planet's atmosphere. When Cassini took this latest image on April 16, it was 38.5 million kilometers (23.9 million miles) away. It's close enough now that the entire planet no long fits inside a single frame of the spacecraft's narrow angle camera. The banded clouds follow Saturn's lines of latitude, which are created by the planet's rotation. Cassini will reach Saturn in July, 2004.
Continue reading
String theorists have a problem. They have a set of theories which could explain how all the forces in the Universe are connected. Unfortunately, it depends on the existence of tiny vibrating strings which are so small they could never be seen directly. One strategy, proposed by physicists from Yale, would be to look at the afterglow from the Big Bang, which covers the entire sky. The small strings could project much larger shadows onto this radiation which would be light-years across, and detectable from Earth.
Continue reading
The European Space Agency's Proba satellite has taken a high resolution image of a segment of the Great Wall of China. There has been much debate about whether or not the wall is visible from space; Yang Liwei, China's first spacefarer, wasn't able to see it. Astronaut Eugene Cernan said that at an altitude of 160 km (100 miles), he was able to see it. Proba orbits at an altitude of 600 km (372 miles), and was designed to demonstrate several Earth observation techniques.
Continue reading
Astronomers have had plenty of time to observe the fluctuations of the Sun, but until now, it's been unclear if other stars go through the same cycles. But new data gathered by the ESA's XMM-Newton X-Ray Observatory has found a similar cycle of radiation in a distant star. The X-ray brightness of HD 81809, located 90 light-years away in the constellation of Hydra, has varied 10 times over the past 2 and a half years, reaching a well defined peak in mid 2002 - just like the Sun's 11 year cycle of sunspot activity.
Continue reading
A new image released from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows the giant elliptical galaxy M87. Bright jets can be seen at the heart of the galaxy, which are generated by a supermassive black hole, and it looks like it's been actively reshaping the galaxy for hundreds of millions of years. Two circular rings are visible extending away from the centre of the galaxy, and were likely caused by two massive explosions millions of years ago.
Continue reading
Here's a 1024x768 desktop wallpaper of a new nebula image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Its technical designation is HD 44179, but it's better known to astronomers as the "Red Rectangle" because of its unusual shape when seen from ground-based telescopes. The star at the heart of the nebula began like our own Sun, but now it's shedding off layers into space, and nearing the end of its life.
Continue reading
As a show of support for President Bush's space exploration initiative, 13 US space advocacy and policy groups have formed an alliance. The groups include: Aerospace Industries Association, Aerospace States Association, American Astronautical Society, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, California Space Authority, Florida Space Authority, The Mars Society, National Coalition of Spaceport States, National Space Society, The Planetary Society, ProSpace, Space Access Society and Space Frontier Foundation. The first goal for the group will be to gain broad congressional support for the new vision - perhaps it won't be difficult considering the groups have 1 million members combined.
Continue reading
Universe Today