Satellite eye on Earth: September 2011 - in pictures
Ice islands in the Atlantic, blocked river valleys in Pakistan and salt lakes in the outback were among the images captured by the European Space Agency and Nasa satellites last month
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See: http://english.cntv.cn/news/space/index.shtml for excellent Space coverage with some stunning images. 
The Åland Islands (also known as the
Aaland Islands) lie at the southern end of the Gulf of Bothnia, between
Sweden and Finland. The archipelago consists of several large islands
and roughly 6,500 small isles, many of them too small for human
habitation. Åland vegetation is a combination of pine and deciduous
forest, meadows, and farmed fields. On nearly every island, however, the
region’s characteristic red rapakivi granite appears
Photograph: Landsat/NASA
Amazing Photos of the SunNASA's newest 3-D photos are the latest in a long line of spectacular images of the star at the center of our planetary system 
This astronaut photograph, taken from the
vantage of the International Space Station (ISS), shows the the space
shuttle Atlantis streaking across the atmosphere. Atlantis Returns From Final Mission Of Space Shuttle Program 
Atlantis Returns From Final Mission Of Space Shuttle Program CAPE CANAVERAL, FL - JULY 21: Space Shuttle Atlantis lands at Kennedy Space Center July 21, 2011 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Atlantis was the shuttle final mission for NASA, ending the 30 years of the shuttle program. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) 21/07/2011 1 of 43
Comet's Death by Sun Photographed for First Time By Tariq Malik , SPACE.com Managing Editor Space.com | SPACE.com –
 The comet met its fiery demise on July 6 when it zoomed in from behind the sun and melted into oblivion as it crashed into the star. It was NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a satellite orbiting Earth that studies the sun, which witnessed the comet's death-blow. One of the SDO spacecraft's high-definition imagers "actually spotted a sun-grazing comet as it disintegrated over about a 15 minute period (July 6, 2011), something never observed before," SDO officials said. [See the observatory's image of the comet death] Comets have been spotted near the sun before, but last week's object was the first to be observed in real-time as it disappeared. "Given the intense heat and radiation, the comet simply evaporated away completely," SDO officials said. The comet was a type known to astronomers as a sun-grazing comet because its path brought it extremely close to the sun. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a joint NASA-European Space Agency spacecraft, also spotted the comet's demise and recorded a video of the event. "This is one of the brightest sun-grazers SOHO has recorded, similar to the Christmas comet of 1996," SOHO project scientist Bernhard Fleck said in a statement. SOHO officials said that, because of the angle of the comet's orbit, it passed across the front half of the sun and appeared to brighten as it struck hotter particles above the solar surface. Sun-grazing comets are relatively common and are also known as Kreutz comets, after the 19th century astronomer Heinrich Kreutz who first showed they were related. Astronomers suspect that Kreutz comets all began as a single, giant comet that broke apart several centuries ago. You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter @tariqjmalik. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. Final countdown: The space shuttle's last ever missionThirty years after the first blast-off, David Usborne reports from the Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, on the end of an era
Friday, 8 July 2011
Dotted across the sprawling campus that is the John F. Kennedy Space Centre in Florida are blue and white signs designed to get the thousands of workers here pepped up. "1 Days to Launch", they declared yesterday above an image of the NASA shuttle. But they might have read "1 Days to Pack up your Bags". It is 30 years since the first shuttle, Columbia, lifted off from its pad here at Cape Canaveral and opened a new chapter in an American space romance that began a decade earlier with the Apollo flights. The mission about to be undertaken by the shuttle will be number 135 and the last. For the first time in half a century, the US will have no means on its own to fire humans to the stars. The shuttle swansong will begin, of course, only when Florida's thundery weather allows. The launch is scheduled for this morning, US time. But as hundreds of thousands of onlookers swarmed to Florida's Space Coast last night, rain fell in chain-mail curtains and the forecast was ominous. Bad conditions, officials said, presented a 70 per cent chance of delaying today's lift-off until Saturday or Sunday. Related articlesWhenever it begins, the last flight of Atlantis will trigger bittersweet emotions here. Even for those tourists cramming the parks and shores to watch the white bird soar on its thick thread of smoke it will, as one NASA spokesman put it, be a "bucket-list" moment, never to be experienced again. Already as the digital countdown directed from Mission Control in Houston ticked down, a sense of nostalgia was filling the press centre. Even reporters who have been covering launches for years weren't shy to have their pictures taken beside a vintage space suit brought into the filing centre for the occasion. The Atlantis voyage – the cargo hold has been crammed with supplies to keep the International Space Station going for at least another year – marks the conclusion of a wind-down process started in 2004 when then President George Bush ordered the whole shuttle fleet retired. President Barack Obama inherited plans to replace it with the Constellation programme to return to the moon, but last year he ditched it. For generations of Americans, NASA has been an acronym for national pride through frontier-breaking innovation and pre-eminence in the race to breach our planet's bounds. It was a race that was initially spurred by American competition with the Soviets in the depths of the Cold War. Some see irony – if not ignominy – in the reality that mothballing Atlantis will present. For the next several years, any American astronauts deployed to the Space Station will have to hitch a ride on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. "Right now, we are dependent upon Russia, and I do find that unseemly for the United States," Mike Griffin, a former NASA administrator, noted mournfully. "I find that unseemly in the extreme." And it is not just those "Days to" signs that will have to be taken away here at the Space Centre. Swathes of employees here – from engineers to welders and even to the guy who drives the huge crawler vehicle used to transport the shuttles from its towering hanger to the pad – will see their careers suddenly ended. A few months ago 17,000 people worked here; weeks after this mission only about 1,000 will remain. NASA officials insist that America's space story is not over. The Obama blueprint for the agency envisages a future with deep-space exploration becoming the main focus, theoretically putting human footprints on Mars and asteroids, if not in this decade then hopefully by the mid-2020s (although getting to Mars may take 10 years longer). But to most Americans, this goal seems murky and undefined. In the shorter term, NASA must adjust itself to getting help from private contractors to restore a direct link to the Space Station. A handful of companies, including SpaceX Boeing and Sierra Nevada, are developing space vehicles first to take cargo and then astronauts to the station on behalf of NASA, perhaps beginning as soon as 2015. NASA hopes some of their development work will happen here at Canaveral. When Atlantis glides back to earth, NASA will celebrate a span of 30 years that saw tragedy with the explosion 73 seconds after lift-off of Challenger in January 1986 and the disintegration of Columbus upon re-entry in February 2003. The price tag for each NASA trip has averaged out at about $1.5 billion. But the shuttles kept the thrill of space travel alive. It became commonplace to see astronauts weightlessly conducting experiments in the dark ink of space or chatting to school children from their living quarters via satellite. One astronaut played his saxophone for us. Senator John Glenn, one of the original Mercury astronauts, rode a shuttle back to space aged 77 in 1998. Perhaps most importantly, it was a shuttle that deployed the Hubble Telescope, giving us sparkling new glimpses into our solar system. Yet when this mission is over, NASA will be like a spacecraft without proper instruments, fishtailing its way forward to a place not yet properly identified and with money that may never be available to it. Scientists predict rare 'hibernation' of sunspots
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Havoc wreaked by a solar storm – such as the one that occurred last week – could be equivalent to a "global hurricane Katrina" that would cost up to $2 trillion dollars in damage to communications satellites, electric power grids and GPS navigation systems, scientists said yesterday. Thursday's solar flare was the biggest for four years and ejected billions of tons of matter travelling at a million miles per hour towards Earth. When it hit our magnetic field it generated magnetic storms and power surges which disrupted communications and grounded flights. Senior government advisers have warned that the world has never been more vulnerable to the effects of such an events, which buffets the complex and delicate electronic technology that now controls almost all aspects of modern society. An increasing reliance on electronic equipment, such as GPS satellite navigation and the computers controlling smart grids for electricity distribution, has meant that solar storms can now produce unprecedented damage on a global scale, they said. Professor Sir John Beddington, the government's chief scientific adviser, said that the growth in the use of complex electronic machinery over the past 10 years has made society far more susceptible to catastrophic disruption than a decade ago when the last solar activity cycle reached its peak."Space weather has to be taken seriously. We've had a relatively quiet period of space weather and we expect that quiet period to end," Sir John told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. "At the same time, over that period the potential vulnerability of our systems has increased dramatically, whether it is the smart grid in our electricity system or the ubiquitous use of GPS systems," he said. The approximately 11-year solar cycle is now emerging from one of its quietest periods in 50 years and is expected to reach a solar maximum in 2013, when the number of solar flares on the Sun which generate electromagnetic storms reaches a peak. "[Last week's] event was the strongest solar flare in four years and as a consequence airlines re-routed flights away from polar regions in anticipation of the possibility that their radio communications would not be operable," said Jane Lubchenco, the head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "In addition to that, communications problems were reported on flights from Hawaii to southern California and the flare disrupted communications in parts of the western Pacific region and Asia. "Clearly this is something we need to take seriously. That particular event was not a very serious one, but as we enter a period of higher solar activity it is reasonable to expect more and more events and they may vary in magnitude," she said. "This is an area that we're beginning to pay much more attention to, not only because we are entering a solar maximum, but because so much more of our technology is vulnerable than was the case even 10 years ago when we had the last solar maximum," she added. Thomas Bogdan, director of the Space Weather Prediction Centre in Boulder, Colorado, said that GPS systems are highly vulnerable to the massive bursts of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun, which energise the charged particles of the Earth's ionosphere. "That ionosphere sits between us and the GPS satellites and the thicker that ionosphere, the longer the time delay between the GPS satellite and when you pick it up," Dr Bogdan said. "In the worst-case situation, on the day-lit side of the Earth, we could see the loss of GPS not only for navigation but for its critical timing capability used in business transactions." About 10 or 20 hours after the initial blast of electromagnetic radiation, a second burst of high-energy charged particles will hit the Earth. These have the ability to induce dangerous electric currents in power lines and oil pipelines, Dr Bogdan said. A 14-year-old early-warning satellite is the only way of directly detecting the potential magnitude of the danger this wave of charge particles within a solar storm poses to pipelines and electronic systems on Earth, he said. "Any storm coming from the Sun has to pass over that spacecraft before it hits Earth. If it takes 20 hours to go from the Sun to Earth, it's going to take about 20 minutes to go from that spacecraft to Earth. So our last warning is a 20-minute warning, which will tell us how big, how strong, how nasty that storm might be," he told the meeting. "The trouble is, it's 14 years old and what keeps me awake at night is worrying about whether that satellite would be running next morning when I get up," he said. Sir John Beddington added: "There are two things we need to be thinking about. We need to think about prediction – the ability to categorise and give warning about when particular types of space weather is likely to occur. The second is about engineering. Thinking about particular sectors and their vulnerability to particular types of space weather – that is a complicated issue and we need to think hard about how to do that," he said. "What is absolutely critical is that we do have to take space weather seriously. This is an international issue and it is international collaboration that is how we are going to deal with it." |
Could 'supermoon' next week disrupt Earth's weather?
Moon comes at its closest approach for 19 years
By Daily Mail Reporter Last updated 8th March 2011
It promises a unique photo opportunity for amateur astronomers.
Earth will next week be at its closest point to the moon since 1992.
The March 19 event - known as a 'lunar perigee' - will see the moon pass just 221,567miles away from our planet.
Earth will be at its closest point - some 221,567 miles away - to the moon in 19 years on March 19. Some fear the 'lunar perigee' will affect our climate pattern
But the Internet is awash with conspiracy-minded amateur scientists
warning that such a 'supermoon' could disrupt Earth's climate patterns
and may even cause earthquakes and volcanic activity.
Previous supermoons took place in 1955, 1974, 1992 and 2005 - all years that had extreme weather events.
The tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people in
Indonesia happened two weeks before the January 2005 supermoon. And on
Christmas Day 1974, Cyclone Tracy laid waste to Darwin, Australia.
Previous supermoons took place in 1955, 1974, 1992 and 2005 - all years that had extreme weather events
But Pete Wheeler of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy
said to treat any warnings of an impending apocalypse with scepticism.
'There will be no earthquakes or volcanoes erupting, unless they are to happen anyway,' he told news.com.au.
'The Earth will experience just a lower than usual low tide and a
higher than usual high tide around the time of the event, but nothing to
get excited about.'
Australian astronomer David Reneke agrees, pointing out that
conspiracy theorists will always be able to find a natural disaster to
link to a certain time and blame it on a supermoon.
He told the website: 'If you try hard enough you can
chronologically associate almost any natural disaster or event to
anything in the night sky - comet, planet, sun.
'Remember in the past, planetary alignments were going to pull the
sun apart. It didn't happen. Astrologers draw a very long bow most
times.
'Normal king tides are about all I would expect out of this supermoon prediction.'
Coincidence? Banda Aceh, Indonesia, was devastated by the December 2004 tsunami which took place two weeks before a supermoon
Whatever does or doesn't happen, we are still learning about the moon all the time.
In January, it emerged that signals from seismic sensors left on
the lunar surface by Apollo astronauts in 1971 have revealed that the
moon has a liquid core similar to Earth's.
Scientists at Nasa applied contemporary seismological techniques to
the data being emitted from sensors placed by their colleagues during
the U.S. space program's heyday.
The research suggested the moon possesses a solid, iron-rich inner
core with a radius of nearly 150 miles and a fluid, primarily
liquid-iron outer core with a radius of roughly 205 miles.
Where it differs from Earth is a partially molten boundary layer around the core estimated to have a radius of nearly 300 miles.
The data sheds light on the evolution of a lunar dynamo - a natural
process by which our moon may have generated and maintained its own
strong magnetic field.Sun's Entire Surface Pictured For First Time 06.02.2011. 
(c) Sky News 2011
Three-dimensional images showing the entire surface of the sun have been released for the first time.
Related photos / videos
The images, taken from two separate Nasa satellites, will allow scientists to see both sides of the star together for the first time.
This will enable significant advances in space weather forecasting for Earth and improve planning for future spacecraft missions throughout the solar system.
The images are believed to be as significant as those taken of the first men on the Moon.
Information about sunbursts was also collected by the satellites, which could be vital for protecting communications on Earth.
Astronomer Robin Scagell told Sky News that a big solar storm on the sun could have a devastating impact on our lives.
"It could wipe out the satellites and what is more, it is quite likely it would knock out the power grids.
"Big currents up in the sky caused by solar storms could cause them all to trip out and damage them.
"We do not have replacement units for these transformers.
"If they went out it could be months or years before they could be replaced nationwide and we would be without power.
"If the satellites give us warning when these storms are due to come we could perhaps shut down the power for 24 hours."
Scientist Professor Heinz Wolff told Sky News: "The sun is our life and small changes in the surface of the sun affect our life very considerably.
"By having a much better image of [the sun], it will make it easier to predict what it is going to do.
"For instance, climate scientists do not know whether climate changes are to do with the sun and anything we can add to our human knowledge by having a much more detailed picture of our life giver will help scientists."
The Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory mission launched its two satellites in 2006.
They are travelling at different speeds and so every few years they achieve 180 degrees of separation on exactly opposite sides of the sun, enabling them to take the pictures.
Scientists to clean up space junk with 'fishing net' 2011.02.01.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has paired up with a top fishing giant to launch a revolutionary net to catch space debris endangering space vehicles.
Related photos / videos
The proposed Space Debris Removal System is currently being developed and could be launched into space within two years.
Experts say that tens of millions of debris particles in space from
unused space exploration equipment to larger remnants of derelict
satellits and rocket stages cause extensive damage to operational
satellites and spacecraft.
William Jeffs, NASA spokesman for the Astromaterials Research and
Exploration Science Directorate at the Johnson Space Center in Houston
discussed the extent of the problem. He told Yahoo! News: "Space debris
is big a concern because spacecraft and The International Space Station
carrying humans onboard have to be maneuvered to avoid hitting debris."
JAXA and Nitto Seimo, the company behind the net have been working
together on the system for six years and hope to counter the issue by
loading a thin several-kilometre-long metal net, known as an
'electrodynamic tether' onto a satellite and launching it into space.
Once the satellite is in orbit, the net which is made of three
silver-coloured threads one millimetre in diameter and tied together
with fibres as thin as human hair- can be attached to a piece of space
debris using the satellite's robot arm. The tether would then be
detached along with the tip of the arm and as the net orbits Earth, it
would become charged with electricity.
Eventually interaction with the Earth's magnetic field would create
a force that gradually draws the net back towards Earth which would
re-enter our atmosphere and burn up inside.
Nitto Seimo's technical division has been trialling different net
material for years. Technician Koji Ozaki told a Japanese news site:
"Unlike fishing nets, which are made of materials such as nylon, it is
difficult to mesh nets made of hard metal. Some unusable failures have
torn into shreds, but eventually we were able to make a usable tether."
Dr William Jeffs responded to Japan's efforts. He said:
"Initiatives to reduce space debris are underway in both the US and the
international space community. But thus far no proposed solution to
reduce the amount of space debris has been proven to be both
technologically feasible and financially viable. We will just have to
wait and see."
Written by Gaby Leslie
Nasa space telescope spots odd new solar system 
Nasa has announced the discovery of a strange new solar system with six planets orbiting around a sun-like star.
Related photos / videos
The discovery is mystifying astronomers and illustrates just how much variety is possible in the universe.
Five of the planets were found to be in a closer orbit to their star than any planet in Earth's solar system.
"We really were just amazed at this gift that Nature...has given us. And with six transiting planets, five so close to their star, and getting the size and masses of these five fairly small worlds, there's only one word that I can think of that adequately describes the new finding we're announcing today - supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," Nasa scientist Jack Lissauer said at a news briefing in Washington DC, referring to the word made famous in the 1964 Disney movie, "Mary Poppins."
The team at Nasa and a range of universities has named the system Kepler-11, after the orbiting Kepler space telescope that spotted it.
The star resembles Earth's own sun. But five of the planets orbiting it are packed into a space equivalent to the distance between Mercury and Venus in our own solar system.
Astronomers have now found more than 500 exoplanets. Most are giant, because they are so far away that only the biggest are detectable. But some researchers are certain there are Earthlike planets out there.
Nasa hails 'significant step' in search for habitable planets
A rocky planet about the size of Earth discovered orbiting a star outside our solar system has been hailed as a "significant step" in the search for habitable worlds similar to our own.
This NASA artist's concept shows the
smallest star known to host a planet, called VB 10b. The planet, named
Kepler-10b, is about 1.4 times the size of Earth Photo: AFP
Kepler-10b, which was found by Nasa's Kepler space telescope, has an estimated temperature of more than 1,370C (2,500F), which is hot enough to melt iron.
But even though it is far too close to its sun for life to survive, the discovery of the smallest planet to be detected outside our solar system was nevertheless described by scientists as a major breakthrough.
The planet, which is about 1.4 times the size of Earth and completes a full orbit of its Sun once a day, could represent another step in the search for other habitable planets, scientists claimed.
Douglas Hudgins, Kepler programme scientist at Nasa, said: "The discovery of Kepler 10-b is a significant milestone in the search for planets similar to our own.
"Although this planet is not in the habitable zone, the exciting find showcases the kinds of discoveries made possible by the mission and the promise of many more to come."
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Natalie Batalha, a professor at San Jose State University and member of NASA's Kepler Mission, said that there is evidence of another potential planet in the same star system, but little is yet known about it.
She said: "There is actually already a very compelling signature of another potential planet in this system.
"There is a transit event that recurs once every 45 days and is suggestive of a planet a bit larger than two times the radius of the Earth."
The findings were described in the Astrophysical Journal.
Solar eclipse wows millions around the world... but is obscured by cloud across most of Britain
By Graham Smith 04.01.2011
- Partial eclipse visible in East Anglia and on the south coast
People hoping to catch a glimpse of
a solar eclipse this morning were left disappointed after clouds
covering Britain blocked out the celestial event.
The dramatic sight of the Moon
passing between the Sun and Earth could be witnessed in parts of East
Anglia and the south coast of England, as well as across the globe.
But the majority of the country
remained swathed in cloud, meaning the UK's first partial solar eclipse
since August 2008 was hidden from view.
Hamble, Hampshire: A partial solar eclipse was visible on England's south coast, as the moon covered the sun at around 8.10am. The majority of Britain had its view of the phenomenon obscured by cloud
Locon, northern France: The partial eclipse extended across much of Europe this morning. The greatest eclipse will occur over the city of Skelleftea in north-east Sweden, where the moon will block out almost 90 per cent of the sun
In London, where the eclipse ended
at 9.31am, approximately 67 per cent of the sun was covered, although
clouds obscured the event.
This compared to just under 70 per
cent in Liverpool and Plymouth, while Glasgow reached 40 per cent and
the Western Isles just 15 per cent.
WHAT HAPPENS DURING AN ECLIPSE OF THE SUN?
A solar eclipse takes place when the moon lines up between the sun and the Earth.
This casts a lunar shadow on the Earth's surface and obscures the solar disk.
During a partial solar eclipse, only part of the sun is blotted out.
Today's partial eclipse was visible across much of the Middle East, Europe, North Africa and central Asia.
It began in the skies over Northern Algeria, the first location to witness the phenomenon at 6.40am GMT.
Western Europe woke up to the sunrise eclipse as it extended across much of the content.
In Madrid, a little less than half of the sun's diameter was covered, whereas in Paris this coverage extended to 65 per cent.
The greatest eclipse occur later in
the morning over the city of Skelleftea in north-east Sweden, where the
moon blocked out almost 90 per cent of the sun.
In central Russia, north-west China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, the phenomenon will take place at sunset.
A plane is silhouetted against the partial eclipse over the cloudy skies of Barcelona
The celestial event produces a
dazzling sight over Dinslaken, Germany. The greatest eclipse will occur
over the city of Skelleftea in north-east Sweden, where the moon will
block out almost 90 per cent of the sun
A solar eclipse takes place in the skies over Studencice, Slovenia. Northern Algeria was the first location to witness the celestial event at 6.40am GMT
In cloudy winter skies over Jerusalem, the sun appeared to have a bite taken out of its upper right section.
ECLIPSES TO COME IN 2011
- June 1 - Partial solar eclipse across Siberia, northern Canada, and Greenland
- June 15 - Total lunar exlipse across Eastern Hemisphere
- July 1 - Partial solar eclipse across southern Antarctic Ocean
- November 25 - Partial solar eclipse visible from southern tip of Africa after sunrise and from Tasmania and southern New Zealand before sunset
- December 10 - Total lunar eclipse the western U.S. and Canada
But in Britain skywatchers were barely able to witness the eclipse at all.
Among those thwarted by the
overcast conditions were members of the Newcastle Astronomical Society,
who set up telescopes and recording equipment to capture the phenomenon
at St Mary's Lighthouse in Whitley Bay, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
But the cloud remained stubbornly in front of the Sun and the astronomers went away with nothing.
The last total eclipse of the sun visible from Britain took place in August 1999.
There will be three other partial solar eclipses in 2011, but none of them will be seen in the UK.
The cloudy conditions over Britain at least reduced the chances of eclipse-watchers damaging their eyesight.
Scientists warned that looking directly at the sun for even a few seconds could cause permanent impairment to vision.
Dame Sally Davies, the Government's
Interim Chief Medical Officer, had called on parents to make sure their
children understood the dangers.
Secret powers? A paralysed boy is buried up to his neck in sand by his parents in Hyderabad, Pakistan, following a doctor's recommendation that light from the eclipse could heal him
Magical moment: Venezuelan tourists watch the partial eclipse in front of the Giza Pyramids in Egypt
Safety first: Israelis watch the eclipse in the town of Givatayim near Tel Aviv
She said: 'Children are
particularly vulnerable as they may be tempted to take a peek. We would
urge parents to explain the danger to their children.
'We would not wish to see another
case like the young boy who lost his central vision back in October 2005
through looking directly at a partial eclipse in his school
playground.'Medical experts said the safest way to watch an eclipse is on the television or live webcasts on the internet.
Observing such an event directly through a telescope, binoculars or camera is not safe under any circumstances.
Dame Sally added: 'Under no circumstances should people look directly at the sun during a partial eclipse.
'The risks of doing so are very real and could lead to irreversible damage to eyesight and even blindness.'
Even viewing a partial eclipse through sunglasses or photographic film is also 'wholly inadequate', experts warned.
They said only specially designed solar filters bearing the appropriate CE mark can be used to view the eclipse directly.
Telescopes ready: Members of the Newcastle Astronomical Society wait at St Mary's Lighthouse in Whitley Bay as overcast skies prevented a view of the eclipse
Different phases: Today's partial solar eclipse as seen from the Zugspitze mountain near Garmisch-Partenkirchen in southern Germany
Nasa to put a robot on the moon 'in just 1,000 days'
By Daniel Bates 02.11.2010.
NASA has unveiled plans to put a robot on the moon for a fraction of the cost of sending a human.
Engineers claim that in
just 1,000 days they can safely build and fire a humanoid-like machine
into space and onto our nearest planet.
It would cost less than
$200million (£124million), plus $250million (£156million) for the
rocket, substantially less than the $150billion (£93billion) it would
be to send an astronaut.
The engineers behind it
also hope that the sight of a robot walking on the Moon would inspire a
new generation of scientists, just as the Apollo landings did 40 years
ago.
The space shuttle Discovery is lit by early morning sunlight on Pad 39A this morning
Project M has been
considered a ‘guerrilla effort’ by NASA engineers due to the lack of
official enthusiasm for returning to the Moon.
As a result they have had
to use discretionary funds, barter with engineering companies, trade
with specialists and persuade NASA units to co-operate.
In one case an engineer
even went to a hardware store to buy $80 (£49) worth of materials to
enable him to test the fuel tank on a prototype aircraft.
The driving force behind the project was Stephen J. Altemus, the chief engineer at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston.
Faced with shrinking
budgets, he wanted something that could be achieved quickly without
getting bogged down in red tape. When he shared his idea with
colleagues it caught on like 'wildfire' and they have not looked back.
The team found that
sending a robot to the Moon is far easier than sending a person - it
does not need air or food and there is no return trip.
Robonaut 2 is set to head into space on board Discovery
The project has also been helped by building on existing technology and modifying it rather than starting afresh.
Robonaut 2, developed by NASA and General Motors, will be on board the shuttle Discovery, which is due to liftoff today.
That will be the first
humanoid robot in space and will deal with the housekeeping chores so
the astronauts can focus on their work.
A prototype landing
aircraft was provided by Armadillo Aerospace, a tiny Texas engineering
company, and it has already flown 18 times.
The only drawback seems
to be that the robot’s capabilities will be limited compared to what a
human can do - even if the sight of it will be inspirational.
So far $9million has been spent on the programme, and NASA is watching closely to see how it pans out.
R. Matthew Ondler, Project M’s manager, said that the thousand day deadline was chosen to add some pressure.
‘It creates this sense of urgency,’ he said. ‘NASA is at its best when it has a short time to figure out things.
You give us six or seven
years to think about something, and we’re not so good. Administrations
change and priorities of the country change, and so it’s hard to
sustain things for that long.’
Asteroid impact warning to the world
 Asteroid impact warning to the world Experts are calling on the world to recognise the "global threat" of an asteroid hit to earth.
Scientists and astronauts have been holding a three-day workshop in Germany, discussing how countries would react.
Rusty Schweickart is a former Apollo 9 astronaut and now head of
the European Sapce Agency's committee on near-earth objects (NEOs): "
What we need to do is bring the world together, recognise that this is
a global threat. This is not Germany or the United States or ESA or
anybody else. This is a global threat."
The conference in the city of Darmstadt is considering theoretical but plausible scenarios of an asteroid impact on our planet.
"The question often arises in the general public: Can we in fact
do something about this. And the answer is yes. We don't even have to
develop new technologies. Our existing space technology enables us to
actually slightly change the orbit of an asteroid that we see headed an
impact 15 or 20 or 50 years ahead of us."
The workshop's finding will later be merged with findings of other
experts to create a final report to the UN committee. The report will
recommend how to react to an impact threat. |
US space shuttle programme faces its final countdown
Tomorrow, Discovery will take off on one of its final missions. Why, 30 years after the reusable rocket launcher threatened to make travel beyond Earth commonplace, did the project fall from grace?
Robin McKie The Observer, 31.10.2010 -
The space shuttle Discovery approaches the International Space Station in October 2007. Photograph: NASA/AP
On the morning of 12 April 1981, astronauts Robert Crippen and John Young took the lift to the top of the launch tower at complex 39A at Cape Canaveral in Florida and strapped themselves into their seats on the space shuttle Columbia. The pair were about to fly the world's first reusable rocket launcher, a 100-tonne chunk of revolutionary space technology. This was the first time Nasa had put men on an untested launcher and the nerves of its staff were by now severely strained.
For hours, engineers had been pumping hundreds of thousands of
gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen into Columbia's fuel tanks. When
combined, the two elements would generate more than a million pounds of
thrust. A further kick would then be provided by two huge solid fuel
boosters containing a highly explosive mixture of aluminium powder and
perchlorate oxidiser.
The countdown reached its final moments, the point at which,
according to former Nasa chief Daniel Goldin, "your breathing slows,
your heartbeat becomes noticeable and an uncomfortable muscle tension
fills your body". And he was just an observer.
Slowly, the minutes ticked away until, eight seconds before
lift-off, the shuttle's turbo pumps – each powerful enough to empty a
swimming pool in 20 seconds – started to force hydrogen and oxygen into
the spacecraft's three main engines, where the two elements combined
with unbridled ferocity. In seconds, temperatures in the engines soared
to 6,000C.
Super-heated steam – generated by the explosive marriage of
hydrogen and oxygen – erupted from the base of the spaceship; the
computer ignited the two solid boosters; the giant bolts which had been
holding the straining shuttle to the ground were blown open; and, at
just after midday, Columbia rose gracefully into the air on a pillar of
white vapour. Twenty years to the day that Yuri Gagarin had become the
first human in space after orbiting Earth in a Vostok capsule, America
had launched the first reusable spaceship.
For the next two days, Columbia circled the Earth. It was a bit
like camping, as Robert Crippen later recalled. "We ended up sleeping
in our seats and you had to pay attention to housekeeping, not to get
things too dirty." Then, after 37 orbits, the mission's pilot trimmed
Columbia's velocity, causing the spaceship to dip into Earth's
atmosphere and on to a perfect, unpowered landing at Edwards Air Force
base in California.
Columbia's flight was greeted with adulation. Its revolutionary
engines had worked perfectly despite the colossal, violent heat of the
combustion of its hydrogen and oxygen fuels, while its thermal
insulation tiles had survived the searing temperatures of re-entry. The
day of the expendable launcher was over. Space travel would soon be
commonplace.
At least that is what Nasa said would happen. In reality, what
occurred was a desperate disappointment. Flights of the shuttle –
despite its brilliant engineering – never became commonplace. Columbia
and its sister craft were supposed to make 50 flights a year, according
to Nasa launch manifests. But only 132 shuttle missions were flown
between 1981 and 2010, an average of 4.5 a year, a grimly inadequate
figure for a craft that "will revolutionise transportation into near
space by routinising it", as President Nixon announced in 1972.
Worse, two of the five shuttles that were built – Challenger and
Columbia – were destroyed in accidents that killed 14 astronauts. In
the wake of these tragedies, Nasa engineers became more and more
safety-conscious and launch costs soared from Nasa's estimate of $7m a
mission to almost $1bn. Thus the shuttle has become the costliest, most
dangerous transport system ever built.
Now it is to be scrapped. At Cape Canaveral, engineers are now
preparing to launch the shuttle Discovery, currently scheduled to blast
off tomorrow on its final mission – to the International Space Station.
There will be two more flights – Endeavour in February and Atlantis in
June. Then the shuttle fleet will be grounded.
But how could this fall from grace have occurred? What turned the
craft that soared so gracefully over Florida in April 1981 into a
redundant, dangerous orbiting dinosaur? These are key questions, for
until they are answered America (and the rest of the west which has
relied so much on the ability to put men into space) will find itself
floundering to find a role in space or a reason for being there. The US
has got lost in space and the failure of the shuttle carries much of
the blame. "The shuttle made America dependent on a fragile, expensive,
risky launch system," says space policy expert professor John Logsdon
of George Washington University. "It created the delusion of easy
access to space. Now we are paying the price."
At the end of the 60s, the US triumphed over its Soviet space
rivals because it spent vast sums on developing its huge Saturn V
launcher which could hurl a manned craft to the moon with ease. After
Apollo 11, Nasa asked that the Saturn V be allowed to ferry large
modules into orbit, where a space station could be constructed by 1975.
From there a Mars mission could be launched in the 1980s.
"President Nixon and his staff just looked at the plan and said,
'Are you kidding?'" says Logsdon, a white-haired, imposing but genial
figure. "They were not interested in such a programme because they
calculated it would do them no good in their term of office. They
wanted a faster fix."
Instead, says Logsdon, Nixon and his aides simply took a map of the United States and looked at key states they needed to win to ensure victory in the 1972 presidential election. The decision came to set up a major aerospace programme involving these states. Construction of a reusable space shuttle, an idea that Nasa had also being toying with, fitted the bill. The agency was ordered to prepare detailed plans – on a very tight budget. The days of high spending on space were over and the Saturn V, which had put Americans on the moon, was dumped.
Stuck with limited resources, Nasa was in trouble, Logsdon says,
and had to give up its original idea of launching the shuttle,
piggyback-style, on a specially designed, manned jet plane. Both
launcher and shuttle would have been reusable. Instead, to save cash
the shuttle would be strapped to huge tanks that would provide fuel for
its engines and to boosters that would provide extra thrust but which
would be dumped during launch. The shuttle was not therefore a fully
reusable spacecraft.
In addition, the agency wanted to use boosters that would burn
liquid fuel, a relatively stable configuration, but in the end had to
choose solid fuel boosters: an untested, less stable, but cheaper
option. For similar reasons, a crew escape system was scrapped.
Then there was the involvement of the military. To find funds for
the shuttle's development, Nasa asked defence chiefs to join in the
project and use the spaceship to put all their military and
surveillance satellites in orbit. The Pentagon agreed but insisted that
the shuttle be capable of flying giant payloads on flights over the
poles so that it could launch spy satellites to any part of the globe.
This requirement meant the shuttle would have to re-enter the
atmosphere on courses that needed far more robust, far heavier thermal
insulation. Starved of cash by Nixon's White House, the agency was
forced to agree.
"The shuttle was designed by a series of compromises to satisfy
too many demands and too many requirements from too many different
bodies," says Logsdon. "The result was a vehicle that could no longer
achieve the basic goals that had been set for it."
Nevertheless, for the first four years of its operations, the
shuttle – for all its flaws – operated well. It launched a total of 24
satellites, retrieved two broken communication satellites and repaired
another in orbit. In addition, it not only flew US astronauts, it
carried citizens of Germany, Mexico, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Holland
into space.
But pressure was mounting on engineers who were finding it
increasingly difficult to maintain the tight launch schedules imposed
by Nasa as it tried to keep shuttle operations cost-effective.
On 28 January 1986, the spacecraft's deficiencies were exposed
with deadly consequences. A seal in a booster of the shuttle Challenger
failed at lift-off. Pressurised hot gas sprayed over the craft's fuel
tank and the spaceship exploded 73 seconds into its flight. Binding
together fuel tanks and boosters had had grim consequences.
The US – an intensely self-conscious nation – reacted with horror and grief. I covered the tragedy for the Observer
and discovered Florida reeling in its wake. On the main road from the
Cape to Miami, all the neon-lit signs on the strip had been changed
from offers of cheap meals and lodging to messages: "May God protect
the shuttle crew"; "We pray for the Challenger astronauts". The
normally busy bars of Cocoa Beach, near the Cape, were empty. Locals
spent the days following the explosion on the beach, hunting in the
sand for any scrap of debris to hand over, desperate to feel that they
were, in some way, helping
At the time, Nasa insisted the crew had been killed instantly. But
the debris revealed a different story: several astronauts had survived
Challenger's initial break-up but, without an escape system, had
perished when their crew compartment crashed into the ocean. It was
also discovered that Nasa managers had disregarded warnings from
engineers about the dangers of launching after the Cape had experienced
near freezing temperatures the night before lift off. The cold caused
the breaking of the booster seal and doomed the flight.
After Challenger, the launch of commercial satellites from the
shuttle was halted; a number of major changes were made to Nasa
operations; and a replacement craft, Endeavour, was ordered. For its
part, the Pentagon simply abandoned the shuttle; it closed down its
special $3bn launch facility in California – without a single craft
having lifted off from it – to leave the spaceship lumbered with the
cumbersome thermal tiles that defence chiefs had insisted must be
fitted. "It's tragic. It made the shuttle far heavier than necessary –
but then there are so many tragic stories when it comes to the
shuttle," says Logsdon. In the end, it is estimated that the accident
cost the US a total of $12bn.
In September 1988, shuttle launches resumed with the lift-off of
Atlantis. Again, Nasa insisted it was dealing with a fully operational,
properly tested vehicle – and not an experimental craft, as it really
was – and so set up a stiff schedule of flights that later included
plans to ferry components to the International Space Station
(construction of which began in 1998).
And again the agency ignored the warnings. In 1989, the US Office
of Technology Assessment calculated there was a 50-50 chance of losing
another shuttle "within 34 flights", while the Augustine committee,
charged with investigating the future of the US space programme, warned
Nasa was "likely to lose another space shuttle in the next several
years".
The agency took no action. This was a problem, says Scott Pace,
head of the Space Policy Institute in Washington, that could be traced
to a simple flaw. "Nasa was trying to do too much with too little for
too long a period because there was not a fundamental policy and
political rationale for what it was doing." In other words it was
pottering about in low Earth orbit with little purpose.
On 1 February 2003, the inevitable happened: Columbia
disintegrated over Texas after it had re-entered the atmosphere and was
preparing to land at the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral. This
time the cause was traced to a briefcase-sized piece of foam insulation
that had fallen from the shuttle's external tank during launch. The
debris had struck Columbia's left wing and damaged its thermal
protection. As the craft swept into the atmosphere, hot gases generated
by its passage through the atmosphere poured into the ship and
eventually broke it apart.
"After the Columbia accident, a lot of us had a reality check,"
says Pace, talking in his Washington office. "Yes, the shuttle was a
magnificent vehicle but surely it was done for now, we thought. The
American part of the space station had already been built by then but
not the European or Japanese components. So we asked our international
partners if they still wanted to proceed.
"To our surprise, they said yes, we should see it through if we
could. It was worth the risk. If they hadn't, that would have been the
end of the shuttle there and then."
So far, those last two dozen missions, which have left the space
station nearly completed, have gone well, with only three more to go.
What follows is more difficult to assess.
After the shuttle's final flight in June 2011, the US will have to
rely on Russian spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the space station, an
ignominious position for the winner of the space race. At the same
time, America's plans for a replacement launcher are shrouded in
uncertainty. President Obama cancelled the Constellation programme that
would have returned America to the use of expendable launch vehicles.
Instead, private launch companies, with US government support, will fly
missions to the space station, the president said. At the same time,
Nasa will pursue a new, undefined heavy launch system.
It is all very vague and unsatisfactory. Yet many senior space
officials refuse to put the whole blame for this confusion on the
shuttle. "It was not an unqualified success but equally it was not a
complete disaster," says Roger Launius, Nasa's chief historian. "The
real tragedy is that we stuck with the shuttle for 30 years."
This is key. The shuttle was a test craft that demonstrated most
but not all of the technology needed to create fully reusable
spacecraft. However, under White House pressure, Nasa treated it as a
fully operational craft.
"The shuttle should have been given an honourable retirement,
which it certainly deserves, in the 1990s, and from the lessons learned
a second-generation, fully reusable launcher would have been
constructed," says Launius. Professor Logsdon agrees: "The shuttle was
a first generation experiment in reusability and affordability. Not
replacing it in the late 80s or early 90s was a failure of national
leadership."
Viewed from this perspective, Discovery's lift-off tomorrow should
be seen not as a triumph of high technology, but as the launch of an
old space bus that long ago served its purpose and which should have
been replaced by a craft that properly befits a nation with true
aspirations in space. "The trouble is that America doesn't know why it
is in space any more," adds Pace. "That is the real problem."
One thing is certain. Nerves at Kennedy Space Centre will be as
taut as they were for that first shuttle launch day in 1981. "Most
senior people at Nasa will be very happy to get this mission and the
next two flown safely and then send the vehicles gracefully into
museums," says Logsdon.
Exactly which museum will get a shuttle has yet to be decided,
though each will make a perfect monument: to engineering ingenuity –
and botched political decision-making.
|
China launches lunar probe
2010.10,01China has launched its second lunar exploration probe, boosting the country's efforts to rise as a major space power.
Related photos / videos
The Chang'e-2 orbiter blasted off from a remote corner of the southwestern province of Sichuan on Friday morning, according to state media. The probe is expected to fly as close as 9.3 miles above the moon and take high-resolution photos of the Bay of Rainbows.
China is jostling with neighbours Japan and India
for a bigger presence in outer space but its plans have faced
international scrutiny. Fears of a space arms race with the United
States and other powers have mounted since China blew up one of its own
weather satellites with a ground-based missile in January 2007.
The Chang'e is named after a mythical Chinese goddess who flew to the moon.
A successful Chang'e-2 mission would mark another advance in
China's plan to establish itself as a space power in the same league as
the United States and Russia.
China launched its first moon orbiter, the Chang'e-1, in October
2007, accompanied by a blaze of patriotic propaganda celebrating the
country's technological prowess
.
Moon may be shrinking, say scientists 
Cracks in the surface of the moon suggest that our nearest neighbour in space is shrinking.
Like a deflating balloon, the satellite is contracting as its interior cools, scientists believe.
The discovery was made after a probe captured images of
unusual fault lines called "lobate scarps" in the lunar highlands.
Similar cracks were first seen in photos taken near the moon's equator
by the Apollo astronauts.
Fourteen new lobate scarps have now been identified by the Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, researchers reported in the journal
Science. They were found mainly in the highlands, showing that the
lines are globally distributed. Experts believe the cracks were created
by rupturing of the brittle lunar crust as the moon shrank - a process
that appears to be geologically recent.
Spectacular meteor shower to grace British skies 10.08.2010.
British
stargazers can look forward to a dazzling meteor shower lighting up our
skies this week in what is predicted to be the most impressive of
annual celestial events.
Related photos / videos
Nasa experts say that as many as 100 shooting stars could fall every hour during the spectacular show, hitting the earth at an incredible 140,000 mph before burning up in our atmosphere.
The storm of meteor activity is set to peak on Thursday night alongside 'near perfect viewing conditions.' Scots have the best chance of seeing the shower clearly with Galloway Forest Dark Sky Park tipped as the place to be. The highest rates of meteor activity are likely to be seen in the early hours of Friday morning.
This year's event is said to be even more spectacular because a new moon this week means there will be no overpowering moonlight to spoil the show.
Nasa experts say the stream of meteor activity is created from the earth travelling through a river of debris from an ancient comet, producing a display of shooting stars called the Perseids.
A Nasa spokesman told The Telegraph that'it promises to be one of the best displays of the year'.
'Monster star': R136a1 compared with our solar system
See how the newly discovered R136a1 star would dwarf our own sun and planets
- Paddy Allen guardian.co.uk, 21.07.2010
Send to a friend
Zooming in on a monster: Three images which
shows how the astronomers zoomed in on the massive star, The cluster is
seen in the bottom right section of the third image
Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope discovers 'superheated planet with comet tail'
A planet orbits so close to its sun that it surface evaporates, leaving it with a comet-like tail, scientists using Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered.
By Andrew Hough, and Amanda Thomas Published: 16.07.2010 The Daily Telegraph
An
artist's impression of the gas giant planet, named HD 209458b. It is
orbiting so close to its star that its heated atmosphere is escaping
into space. Photo: NASA
The planet, nicknamed Osiris, is 153 light-years from Earth and is
only slightly smaller than Jupiter, our solar system’s biggest
planet. It was first detected in 1999 when scientists noticed a
minute reduction in the brightness of its star, caused by the planet
passing in front of it.
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But astronomers at the space agency
have only just found that powerful stellar winds are sweeping the
"superheated" planet’s atmosphere out behind it. Experts say this has
led to the tail-like effect being captured by the Hubble. The "tail"
theory had been hinted at previously but not confirmed until now.
In 2003 astronomers used the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph,
a Hubble instrument, to investigate the planet and its atmosphere but
could not prove their theory.
The planet, officially called HD 209458b, orbits around the star
once every three and a half days, travelling so close to the star that
its surface becomes scorched. Some of this scorched material is
released as gas into the atmosphere, and swept by powerful stellar
winds into a tail similar to that of a comet.
The innermost planet in our Solar System is Mercury, which takes
88 days to orbit the Sun once, 25 times longer than Osiris takes to
orbit its star.
Scientists from the University of Colorado used the space agency’s
Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, another instrument on the Hubble, which
determines the nature of gases by examining how light from stars passes
through them. They found heavy elements such as silicon and carbon in
the planet’s atmosphere, which suggested that the planet was being
heated to 1000 degrees Fahrenheit (2000° C).
The researchers also found that gas was travelling behind the
planet at different velocities and in different directions, rather than
in a conventional atmosphere, leading them to believe that this
material was akin to the planet’s “tail”.
Dr Jeffrey Linsky,
who led the study, said it was the first time that astronomers had been
able to measure the gas coming off the planet at specific speeds.
"Since 2003 scientists have theorised the lost mass is being pushed
back into a tail, and they have even calculated what it looks like," he
said. "We think we have the best observational evidence to support
that theory. We have measured gas coming off the planet at specific
speeds, some coming toward Earth. “The most likely interpretation is
that we have measured the velocity of material in a tail."
The loss of material caused by the extreme heat and speed of the
planet is only very slight, meaning it will take “about a trillion
years for the planet to evaporate,” Dr Linksy added.
More:
Rare solar eclipse over Easter Island guardian.co.uk, 12.07.2010. Reuters
Thousands gathered in Rapa Nui National Park to watch the full eclipse of the sun which darkened the sky for four minutes
Link to video: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2010/jul/12/solar-eclipse-easter-island
Science
European probe Rosetta successfully flies by asteroid: ESA 
The European spacecraft Rosetta performed a fly-by of a massive asteroid on Saturday, the European Space Agency said, taking images that could one day help Earth defend itself from destruction.
Related photos / videos
Racing
through the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter at 47,800 kph
(29,925 mph), the billion-euro (1.25-billion-dollar) probe flew within
3,200 kms (2,000 miles) of the huge potato-shaped rock, Lutetia.
"The fly-by has been a spectacular success with Rosetta performing
fautlessly," ESA said in a statement. "Just 24 hours ago, Lutetia was
a distant stranger. Now, thanks to Rosetta, it has become a close
friend," the agency added.
Holger Sierks of Germany's Max Planck Institute, who is in charge
of the spacecraft's Osiris (Optical, Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote
Imaging System) camera said the more than 400 "phantastic images"
showed many craters and details.
"Rosetta opened up a new world which will keep scientists busy for years," he added.
"We have completed the fly-by phase," Rosetta's director of
operations Andrea Accomazzo said earlier on the ESA's website from the
European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany.
The aim of the fly-by of the asteroid, measuring 134 kms (83.75
miles) in diameter, is to measure Lutetia's mass and then calculate its
density, knowledge which could one day be a lifesaver, according to ESA
scientists.
If a rogue asteroid enters on a collision course with Earth,
knowing its density will help the planet's defenders to determine
whether they should try to deflect the rock or, instead, blow it up.
As Rosetta is around half a million kilometres from Earth, the probe's signal and images took 25 minutes to be received.
Once widely dismissed as bland lumps of debris left over from the
building of the planets, asteroids have turned out to be intriguingly
individual. They are extremely different in shape and size, from just
hundreds of metres (yards) across to behemoths of 100 kms (60 miles) or
more, and also vary in mineral flavours.
Most measurements suggest Lutetia is a "C" type of asteroid,
meaning that it contains primitive compounds of carbon. But others
indicate it could be an "M" type, meaning that it holds metals.
New data proving this could rewrite the theory about asteroid
classification. Metallic asteroids are far smaller than Lutetia: they
are deemed to be fragments of far larger rocks that, in the bump and
grind of the asteroid belt, were smashed apart.
The fly-by comes halfway through the extraordinary voyage of
Rosetta, launched in 2004 on a 12-year, 7.1-billion-kilometre
(4.4-billion-mile) mission.
One of the biggest gambles in the history of space exploration,
the unmanned explorer is designed to meet up in 2014 with Comet 67/P
Churyumov-Gerasimenko 675 million kms (422 million miles) from home.
The goal is to unlock the secrets of these lonely wanderers of the
cosmos, whose origins date back to the dawn of the Solar System, some
4.5 billion years ago, before planets existed.
To get to its distant meeting point, Rosetta has had to play
planetary billiards for five years, using four "gravitational assists"
from Earth and Mars as slingshots to build up speed.
Image of Big Bang ghost captured
05.07.2010.A striking image showing the ghost of the Big Bang has been captured by a new space telescope.
Related photos / videos
The Planck satellite was launched by the European Space Agency in May 2009 to study the early universe. It is designed to scan the sky with instruments sensitive to nine different bands of normally invisible microwave light.
Picking up cosmic microwaves makes it possible to see the
"afterglow" of radiation produced by the Big Bang that gave birth to
the universe around 14 billion years ago.
Known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), it contains
information that can help scientists piece together what happened when
the universe began.
The Planck image shows the main disc of the Milky Way galaxy, the
Sun's starry "home", with the yellow-mottled CMB above and below it.
The radiation was released as the first atoms were forming, just
400,000 years after the Big Bang brought matter, space and time into
existence.
Dr David Parker, director of space science and exploration at the
UK Space Agency, said: "Planck has 'painted' us its first spectacular
picture of the universe. This single image captures both our own cosmic
backyard - the Milky Way galaxy that we live in - but also the subtle
imprint of the Big Bang from which the whole universe emerged."
The image shows dust strewn throughout the galaxy in blue, with a
red band across the centre showing hot regions. Variations in the CMB
backdrop represent minute differences in the temperature and density of
matter when the galaxies had not yet formed.
Satellite Earth Images - May
This panorama was taken by an astronaut looking south-east across
the South American continent when the International Space Station (ISS)
was almost directly over the Atacama desert near Chile’s Pacific coast.
The high plains (3,000–5,000 metres) of the Andes mountains appear in
the foreground, with a line of young volcanoes (dashed line) facing the
much lower Atacama desert (1,000–2,000m elevation). Several
salt-crusted dry lakes occupy the basins between major thrust faults in
the Puna. The largest of these, Salar de Arizaro, is seen in the
foreground in this view. The Atlantic Ocean coastline, where
Argentina’s capital city of Buenos Aires sits along the Río de la
Plata, is dimly visible at image top left
Photograph: ISS/NASA Japanese probe yields insights into Moon's inner life 04.07.2010.
Japanese astronomers on Sunday said they had found traces of a mineral that adds an important piece of knowledge to the puzzle of the Moon's geological past. Skip related content
Related photos / videos
Using a instrument-laden probe, Kaguya, which was placed in orbit around the Moon in 2007, the team found abundant signatures of the mineral in concentric rings in three big crater regions.
The mineral, called olivine, is deemed to be a telltale of mantle,
the deep inner layer of iron- and magnesium-rich rock that lies beneath
the Moon's crust.
A leading theory is that the Moon was created about 4.5 billion
years ago after the "Big Whack" -- it was ripped from Earth after our
planet suffered a gigantic collision from some space object.
As the material coalesced into a ball, its surface gradually
cooled, forming a crust made of a light-coloured aluminous mineral,
feldspar, which floated in a dense, molten liquid.
Kaguya's data add a chapter to this "lunar magma ocean" hypothesis.
It suggests that after the crust had formed, there was some
massive overturn in the fiery liquid beneath. Olivine-rich mantle was
brought from deep within the lunar bowels to within the base of the
crust.
At the craters sampled by the probe -- the South Pole-Aitken,
Imbrium and Moscoviense impact basins -- the Moon's crust is very thin,
and the olivine mantle may have been exposed by asteroids that smashed
into the lunar surface, the paper suggests.
The Moon's crust is believed to be far thicker than Earth's,
averaging around 70 kilometres (45 miles) in depth, although the
thickness varies significantly.
The structure and origins of the Moon's mantle have been fiercely
debated by astro-geologists. The famous Moon rocks brought back by the
Apollo missions shed no light on the question, as they were all from
the lunar crust. As a result, pointers to the existence of the mantle
were, for decades, either sketchy or indirect.
The study, published online by the journal Nature Geoscience, is
headed by Satoru Yamamoto of the National Institute for Environmental
Studies in Tsukuba.
Star wars: Planet being devoured by yellow dwarf's heavenly inferno
An exoplanet known as Wasp-12b is being roasted and ripped apart after getting too close to its parent star
- Ian Sample, science correspondent guardian.co.uk, 26.05.2010
Artist's conception of
the explanet Wasp-12b being mangled by the heat of its parent star,
after being caught in its gravitational pull. Illustration: G
Bacon/STScI/Nasa/EsaIn a far-away region of the galaxy, a planet is learning the
lesson that Icarus taught the ancient Greeks thousands of years ago.
A planet known as Wasp-12b is passing so close to its parent star
that it is being roasted and ripped apart in an extraordinary display
of celestial violence.
The gravitational pull of the star is so strong it has stretched
the planet into the shape of a rugby ball. The planet has reached a
temperature of more than 1,500C and material has begun spilling from it
onto the star.
The planet's precarious situation was revealed by observations made with a new instrument on Nasa's Hubble space telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (Cos).
"We see a huge cloud of material around the planet which is
escaping and will be captured by the star. We have identified chemical
elements never before seen on planets outside our own solar system,"
said Carole Haswell, lead scientist at the Open University.
The planet may have only 10m years left before it is completely devoured, according to a report in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The star, a yellow dwarf called Wasp-12, is about 600 light years
from Earth in the winter constellation of Auriga, the charioteer. The
planet was spotted and named by the UK's Wide Area Search for Planets
(Wasp) team in 2008.
The Wasp telescope looks for periodic dimming caused by planets
moving across the faces of their parent stars. Wasp-12b is so close to
its star, it completes an orbit in 1.1 days.
The Cos equipment monitors ultraviolet light coming from stars and
was sensitive enough to show that the atmosphere of the planet had
expanded greatly because it is so hot.
Space yacht Ikaros ready to cast off for far side of the sun
Interplanetary cruise of Japan's solar-powered 'sail craft' aims at deeper knowledge of Venus
- Justin McCurry in Tokyo guardian.co.uk, 17.05.2010
The space craft Ikaros, above, with its
20-metre sail, will be driven forward by both photon propulsion and
solar power generation. Photograph: Jaxa
Japan hopes to turn the wildest fantasies of science fiction into reality today with a "space yacht" that will draw on the power of the sun to take it to Venus and, perhaps, far beyond.
A Mitsubishi H-2A rocket carrying Ikaros (an acronym for
Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun) is set
to blast off from Tanegashima island in south-west Japan at 6.44am
local time.
The long-awaited launch is seen as part of a mission that could
change the course of interplanetary exploration. If it is successful,
Ikaros will be carried through deep space at high speed with the help
of a 20-metre sail, propelled by the pressure from solar particles.
The flexible membrane sail, which at 32.5 micrometers is about
half the thickness of a human hair, is covered with thin-film solar
panels that will create a hybrid of electricity and pressure, according
to Jaxa, the Japanese space exploration agency. Solar photons will
bounce off thousands of tiny mirrors to give Ikaros the thrust it needs
to complete manoeuvres such as rotating and hovering.
Although the name of Japan's craft may give rise to anxiety
(Icarus, the figure from Greek mythology, having fallen into the sea
after flying too close to the sun) Jaxa officials say they are
confident the high-tech version will stick to its planned trajectory.
The craft will spend a few weeks rotating before unfurling its
sail. If all goes to plan, the craft will use draw on the energy
provided by the sun's photons to gather speed during its six-month
journey. Experts believe that by developing hyper-powerful sails
drawing on laser light instead of sunlight, solar yachts could one day
reach speeds of 500,000mph.
After passing Venus, Ikaros is expected to continue its voyage for
three years towards the far side of the sun, although contact is likely
to be lost after a year. Jaxa officials say that, if the technology
proves viable, they could send a similar craft, Akatsuki, to Jupiter by
2020.
That mission could deepen our understanding of how Venus, thought
to have once resembled Earth, became the mysterious, cloud-covered,
planet of today. The probe is equipped with instruments that will
observe the planet's atmosphere from distances of between 186 miles and
49,710 miles.
The $16m project will be the first to deploy the new technology
deep in space. Previous space yachts have achieved no more than
orbiting Earth, while Nasa and Europe's space agency appear to have
resigned themselves to losing out to Japan in the race to test solar
sails in outer space.
Welcome to a new Eden – two billion miles from Earth
No other body in the solar system more closely resembles Earth than Saturn's moon, Titan. It has methane lakes and seas and scientists now believe that an underground ocean could even harbour life, says Robin McKie
- The Observer, 09.05.2010
Titan has large areas of liquid methane on its surface. Illustration by Ron Miller
Five years ago, several hundred scientists gathered at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, to witness a remarkable event: the reception of the first signals to be sent from the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
It had taken engineers a decade to plan and construct Huygens,
Europe's unmanned mission to this mysterious world. In addition, the
probe's 2-billion-mile journey there, on board its Nasa-built
mother craft, Cassini, took a further seven years. A great many careers
depended on the mission's success. Hence the tension in the control
room on 14 January, 2005.
"If Huygens had failed, it would have been a disaster. We knew we
wouldn't get another shot at Titan for 20 years," says Professor John
Zarnecki. His Open University team designed key instruments for the
probe, which is named after the 17th-century Dutchastronomer Christopher Huygens who discovered Titan.
"There was another nagging worry. We had talked up Titan as an incredibly exciting place in order to get the space
agencies to fund Huygens. Yet we only had the word of the theoreticians
that this orange fuzzball, as it appeared in our best images, was
interesting. If it turned out to be dull and boring, we would have egg
all over our faces."
Then the data arrived and from the very first results, greeted with jubilation at Darmstadt, it was clear that the European Space Agency's
probe had performed superbly. More to the point, Titan appeared to be a
very exciting place indeed. Photographs revealed shorelines bounding
dark lakes while the surface was found to have a crunchy constituency,
likened by one researcher to creme brulee.
Since then, scientists have been studying signals sent back by
Huygens during its two-and-a-half-hour parachute descent through
Titan's thick, orange-coloured, nitrogen-rich atmosphere. These
provided enough data to fill no more than a simple memory stick, making
Huygens's results some of the most expensive and precious to be
collected by scientists.
At the same time, its mother ship, Cassini, has continued its
camera and radar sweeps of the haze-covered moon to uncover key surface
features. In combination, these two sets of results – only recently
fully analysed – have uncovered a world far more extraordinary than
ever suspected.
"There are lakes and seas that make Titan the only other place,
other than the Earth, in the solar system with large, stable bodies of
liquid on its surface," says Zarnecki. "There are also river channels;
great stretches of dunes; weather and meteorology; complex
hydrocarbons; and – most excitingly – powerful signs that Titan has a
subsurface ocean that could provide a home for primitive life. Titan
turns out to be an incredible place. It's a moon that would be a
planet."
In fact, Titan looks like Earth in many ways – with one critical
exception. It is extraordinarily cold, with atmospheric temperatures
200 degrees below that of our planet. Ten times further from the Sun
than Earth, Titan consequently receives a hundredth of the solar heat
that bathes our world. There may be complex organic material littering
the place, but conditions are simply too cold on Titan for life to
evolve from this material on the surface.
It turns out that those rivers, lakes and seas on the surface are
not watery affairs but are made of methane which plays the same
meteorological role on Titan as water does on Earth. It evaporates from
great seas of liquid methane, like the giant Kraken Mare. Then it
condenses and falls as methane rain, sometimes setting off flash floods
that carve out riverbeds like the ones picked out by the cameras on
Huygens.
"Water exists in three forms on Earth: liquid, vapour and ice,"
says Zarnecki. "The same is true for methane on Titan. Hence its role
in driving the moon's weather systems."
As for the existence of Titan's complex hydrocarbons, these are
formed in its upper atmosphere where the Sun's weak, ultra-violet
radiation breaks down methane into molecules that re-form into more
complex, petrol-like hydrocarbons. These are responsible for much of
the haze that has hidden Titan's surface like a smog over Los Angeles.
Devices on board Huygens have detected ethane, acetylene and other
complex hydrocarbon molecules – an oilman's dream. These hydrocarbons
are then swept to the ground by the moon's rain, though gravity on
Titan is so weak that the resulting oily droplets would be far larger
than raindrops on Earth.
These seas and lakes don't tell the whole story, however. As
Huygens settled on the moon's surface, it photographed a landscape of
pebbles that turn out to be made not of stone, but of ice, evidence
that water exists at least in one form on Titan.
The fact is that if Titan were not so cold, it would probably be
bursting with life, so plentiful are its supplies of organic raw
materials, scientists suggest. The moon is, in effect, a chilled
leftover from the formation of the early solar system. It is,
therefore, of enormous scientific importance, according to Al Diaz,
science associate administrator of Nasa, which collaborated with Europe
on Huygens. "Titan is a time machine that gives us a chance to look at
conditions that existed on early Earth," he said after Huygens's
results were received.
In any case, this moon may yet have its day as a home of complex
lifeforms. "In a couple of billion years, our Sun will expand to become
a type of star called a red giant and will envelop Earth in superhot
plasma," says Zarnecki. "Our oceans will boil off and the Earth will
become a very unpleasant place to live. By contrast, temperatures will
go up nicely by a couple of hundred degrees on Titan. This will be the
new Eden."
Crucial to this scenario are Cassini's radar observations which
reveal that Titan has a highly irregular rotation. "All planets and
moons have slight spin irregularities, including Earth," explains
Zarnecki. "This lengthens or shortens our day by a microsecond or two.
But on Titan the effect is much greater, suggesting the existence of an
underground ocean which separates the moon's crust from its core. This
layer acts as the fluid in a giant ballbearing which allows Titan's
crust and core to spin at different rates, hence those irregularities."
As for the make-up of that liquid layer, evidence points to water
as the prime candidate. And that, in turn, has exciting consequences,
say scientists. Titan probably has a hot core which is keeping that
layer of water in a warm liquid state. Thus, we have the prospect of a
rich soup of hydrocarbons filtering through Titan's crust to a
subterranean ocean.
"These discoveries make Titan very interesting biologically. We
have got loads of organics on the surface and liquid water down below.
Can the two mix? Have they been mixing for billions of years? In other
words, are there thriving colonies of bugs down there, crawling about
and living very happily below Titan's surface?"
Not surprisingly, such a prospect is fuelling scientists'
appetites for a return mission to Titan. Several probes are being
planned including a joint European-American mission that would carry
airships and balloons. These would take advantage of the moon's thick
atmosphere, which is denser than Earth's, and its low gravity, which is
a seventh of ours.
"Flying on Titan should be easy and by following its winds, we should be able to sail round it in a couple of weeks, looking for promising places to land and investigate," says Zarnecki. "We could also sail robot ships on its methane seas and become the first extraterrestrial mariners. Most important, however, we could try and find signs of simple biology on Titan. That would be pure gold."
Jupiter loses one of its stripes By Claire Bates 13.05.2010
The largest planet in our
solar system is usually dominated by two dark bands in its atmosphere,
with one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere.
However, the most recent
images taken by amateur astronomers have revealed the lower stripe
known as the Southern Equatorial Belt has disappeared leaving the
southern half of the planet looking unusually bare. The band was present in
at the end of last year before Jupiter ducked behind the Sun on its
orbit. However, when it emerged three months later the belt had
disappeared.
Jupiter was pictured this month (left) looking unusually bare, compared to July 2009 (right). It has lost its dark red Southern Equatorial Belt although scientists are unclear as to why. The pictures have different tones because they were snapped a year apart.
Journalist and amateur
astronomer Bob King, also known as Astro_Bob, was one of the first to
note the strange phenomenon. He said: 'Jupiter with
only one belt is almost like seeing Saturn when its rings are edge-on
and invisible for a time - it just doesn't look right.'
It is not the first time
this unusual phenomenon has been noticed. Jupiter loses or regains one
of its belts every ten of 15 years, although exactly why this happens
is a mystery.
Enlarge 
Jupiter has a complex belt system
Jupiter has a complex belt systemThe planet is
a giant ball of gas and liquid around 500million miles from the Sun.
It's surface is composed of dense red, brown, yellow, and white clouds
arranged in light-coloured areas called zones and darker regions called
belts.
These clouds are created
by chemicals that have formed at different heights. The highest white
clouds in the zones are made of crystals of frozen ammonia. Darker,
lower clouds are created from chemicals including sulphur and
phosphorus. The clouds are blown into bands by 350mph winds caused by
Jupiter's rapid rotation.
Noted Jupiter watcher
Anthony Wesley, who spotted an impact spot on its surface last year,
has tracked the disappearing belt from his back garden in Australia.
'It was obvious last year
that it was fading. It was closely observed by anyone watching
Jupiter,' he told The Planetary Society.
'There was a big rush on to find out what had changed once it came back into view.'
Mr Wesley said while it
was a mystery as to what had caused the belt to fade, the most likely
explanation was that it was linked to storm activity that preceded the
change.
'The question now is when will the South Equatorial belt erupt back into activity and reappear?' Mr Wesley said.
The pattern for this
happening is when a brilliant white spot forms in the southern zone.
Gradually it will start to spout dark blobs of material which will be
stretched by Jupiter's fierce winds into a new belt, and the planet
will return to its familiar 'tyre track' appearance.
Jupiter will be closest to Earth on September 24, offering stargazers their best chance of seeing it without its stripe.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1277734/Jupiter-loses-stripes-scientists-idea-why.html#ixzz0nnHgacEE
Hubble Space Telescope: the first 20 years in pictures
 |
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990. To
celebrate its 20th anniversary, NASA have released this image of
chaotic activity atop a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust
that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright
stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars
buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from
towering peaks. This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a
tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500
light-years away in the southern constellation Carina
SDO reveals the sun in all its glory (7 pictures)
1 / 7 
-
More on this story
-
Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) records video footage of a 'prominence eruption' arcing from the surface of the sun
1 / 7
Launched on 11 February 2010, SDO is the most advanced spacecraft ever to study the sun
Photograph: Nasa/EPA
NASA Releases Dramatic New Sun Pictures 
© Sky News 2010
Astonishing new pictures that could help unlock the secrets of the Sun have been released by Nasa.
Related photos / videos
Related content
The dramatic videos and images - 10 times
clearer than high definition TV - show giant flares and clouds of
ionised gas erupting from the surface of the star.
One video captures a blast know as a coronal mass ejection, in
which the same amount of material contained in the whole Mississippi
River is ejected at one million miles per hour - in 30 seconds.
The images were taken by Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
The satellite, which carries four telescopes along with a plethora
of other hi-tech equipment, will examine the Sun's magnetic field and
its impact on the Earth's atmosphere and climate.
Solar flares are known to affect the world's weather, knock out power supplies and affect navigational equipment.
Madhulika Guhathakurta, the mission's programme scientist at Nasa,
said: "It is the most comprehensive view of the Sun. "When you see the
whole Sun, it is showing connections we have never seen before."
The £522m million observatory will operate for at least five years.
US air force set to launch unmanned shuttle
The US air force quietly prepares to launch the X-37B, a robotic spacecraft, into space just days after the return of the Discovery shuttle
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/video/2010/apr/21/us-shuttle-x-37b-discovery
Science
Technology
Space shuttle performs back flip to dock on to International Space Station
By Daily Mail Reporter 09.04.2010
The thought of parking
even the smallest car in a tight space can often leave nervous drivers
terrified. But astronauts on the space shuttle Discovery took
performing a three-point turn to a whole new level yesterday when they
performed a back flip before docking the shuttle underneath the
International Space Station (ISS).
The shuttle commander Alan Poindexter skillfully docked Discovery at 2.30am on Wednesday morning.
You have reached your destination: The space shuttle Discovery pulls into position for the manoeuvre
1, 2, 3, turn! Discovery begins its unusual three point turn
Result: The shuttle ends up upside down, in the perfect position to dock onto the space statio
Later the same day
astronauts from Discovery used a robotic arm to lift a 13-ton cargo
carrier from the payload bay onto the space station. Half of container
is taken up by science experiments and supplies, as well as a new
bedroom and freezer.
Nasa said the sleeping
compartment may be turned into a powder room, where space station
residents can take sponge baths in an enclosed space. At the moment
astronauts run the risk of drops of water floating away and getting
into electronic equipment when they clean up.
In total the crew will unload and transfer 17,000 pounds of science racks and other supplies.
A
shuttle crew member is seen waving (top right) as the commander of the
Discovery shuttle prepared to dock without radar support
The Italian-built cargo
carrier - named Leonardo after Signor da Vinci - will return to Earth
filled with rubbish and old equipment.
Then it will be
beefed up and flown back up in September as a permanent storage unit
for the space station. That will be the last shuttle flight.
Meanwhile the crew have been busy sending huge reams of data from the station to Mission Control.
The files contain laser images of the space shuttle Discovery, which
was unable to send the information directly due to a broken antenna
that was revealed when it reached orbit.
A
close-up view of one of the space shuttle Discovery's wings. Every
shuttle is checked for damage post-launch after the 2003 Columbia
disaster
Nasa will study the
pictures sent from the ISS of Discovery's wings and nose cone. Ever
since the 2003 Columbia tragedy, Nasa has checked each shuttle for any
launch damage to the heat shields following lift-off.
The fault meant the Discovery crew also had to dock without the use of the normal radar tracking system.
Commander Poindexter used
a video feed of the docking hatches to line the shuttle up with the
ISS. It was only the second docking without radar assistance in 10 years.
Astronaut Soichi Noguchi captured the shuttle Discovery approaching the station during docking
The latest mission marks the achievement of having four women aboard the same spacecraft for the first time.
Americans Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger and Stephanie Wilson and Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazak, joined American
Tracy Caldwell Dyson, who was launched aboard a Soyuz rocket from
Kazakhstan on Friday with two Russian male astronauts.
It was also the first time two Japanese astronauts have been aboard the space station simultaneously.
Space Shuttle Discovery launches
The Space Shuttle Discovery has launched, taking off for the International Space Station. 05.04.2010
The space shuttle Discovery lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 5, 2010 Photo: AFP
It blasted off from the Kennedy
Space Center in Florida at 6.21am (1121 BST). The shuttle and its crew
of seven will deliver spare parts and science experiments to the nearly
completed space station.
Discovery 7's mission will last nearly two weeks
and coincide with the 29th anniversary of the first shuttle flight on
April 12. Three days later, President Barack Obama will visit the Cape
Canaveral area to outline his post-shuttle plans for NASA.
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The US president already has cancelled NASA's follow-up moon program.
Commander Alan Poindexter paused at the base of
Discovery to take pictures of his crew. Before boarding the shuttle, he
held up a handwritten sign telling his wife and two sons, "I love you!
See you soon".
There were screams of excitement from the crowd for
Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazaki, set to become the second woman from
her country to soar into space.
Fuelling was delayed a little on Sunday because of
a voltage spike in one of Discovery's fuel cells. Engineers suspected
the brief surge was related to the cockpit lights, and said it posed no
problem for lift-off.
Only four shuttle flights remain. NASA plans to retire the fleet this autumn.
Once that happens, the space station will rely exclusively on other countries' vessels for crews and supplies.
Three new residents arrived on Sunday — one American and two Russians.
The station's population will temporarily swell
from six to 13 when Discovery arrives. Four will be women, the most
ever in space at once.
Two of the astronauts will be Japanese — another
first. Scores of journalists and space officials from Japan descended
on the launch site to witness the big event.
Space Shuttle Discovery launches
The Space Shuttle Discovery has launched, taking off for the International Space Station. 05.04.2010
The space shuttle Discovery lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 5, 2010 Photo: AFP
It blasted off from the Kennedy
Space Center in Florida at 6.21am (1121 BST). The shuttle and its crew
of seven will deliver spare parts and science experiments to the nearly
completed space station.
Discovery 7's mission will last nearly two weeks
and coincide with the 29th anniversary of the first shuttle flight on
April 12. Three days later, President Barack Obama will visit the Cape
Canaveral area to outline his post-shuttle plans for NASA.
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-
Space shuttle Discovery blasts off without hitch
-
Space shuttle Endeavour lands in Florida after international space station mission
-
Endeavour shuttle successfully docks at International Space Station
-
Nasa space shuttle Endeavour blasts off
-
Fifth attempt to launch Endeavour shuttle postponed
-
Endeavour shuttle launch delayed further
The US president already has cancelled NASA's follow-up moon program.
Commander Alan Poindexter paused at the base of
Discovery to take pictures of his crew. Before boarding the shuttle, he
held up a handwritten sign telling his wife and two sons, "I love you!
See you soon".
There were screams of excitement from the crowd for
Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazaki, set to become the second woman from
her country to soar into space.
Fuelling was delayed a little on Sunday because of
a voltage spike in one of Discovery's fuel cells. Engineers suspected
the brief surge was related to the cockpit lights, and said it posed no
problem for lift-off.
Only four shuttle flights remain. NASA plans to retire the fleet this autumn.
Once that happens, the space station will rely exclusively on other countries' vessels for crews and supplies.
Three new residents arrived on Sunday — one American and two Russians.
The station's population will temporarily swell
from six to 13 when Discovery arrives. Four will be women, the most
ever in space at once.
Two of the astronauts will be Japanese — another
first. Scores of journalists and space officials from Japan descended
on the launch site to witness the big event.
Liftoff: The shuttle Discovery creates a stunning arc of light as it lifts off from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida this morning
Mission: The shuttle is carrying a cargo hauler filled with equipment, experiments, food and supplies for the International Space Station, which is expected to be finished in September after 12 years of construction
Up, up and away: The pre-dawn launch set a record for the most number of women in space at once
Discovery is seen streaking into space as a plume of smoke floats through the air
Rare sight: The International Space Station flies over Space Shuttle Discovery as it sits on launch pad at Kennedy Space Centre
Exploration: Crew members (left to right) Clayton Anderson, Naoko Yamazaki, Stephanie Wilson, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Rick Mastracchio, pilot James Dutton Jr and commander Alan Poindexter wave ahead of this morning's launch
"Catastrophic event" stopped growth of galaxy 
12.03.2010
A "catastrophic event" halted the birth of stars in a galaxy in the early Universe, scientists have revealed.
Related photos / videos
'Catastrophic event' halted development of galaxy Play video
'Catastrophic event' halted development of galaxy Play video
"Catastrophic event" stopped growth of galaxy
The researchers from Durham University's Department of Physics observed the massive galaxy as it would have appeared billions of years ago.
They say the galaxy, which is similar to our Milky Way,
exploded in a series of blasts trillions of times more powerful than
any caused by an atomic bomb.
The blasts apparently happened every second for millions of years.
The explosion was said to have been caused from powerful winds
prompted by dying stars or when debris overflowed from a black hole in
the galaxy.
Dr Dave Alexander, who lead the research, said: "We are looking
into the past and seeing a catastrophic event that essentially switched
off star formation and halted the growth of a typical massive galaxy in
the local Universe."
The team now plans to study other massive star-forming galaxies in
the early Universe to see if they display similar characteristics.
Nasa mission to unravel sun’s threat to Earth. From The Sunday Times 31.01. 2010. A new probe could help scientists predict the solar storms that cause chaos for us
Scientists have designed a space probe to peer deep beneath the solar surface and observe how sunlight is generated Chris Hastings and Jonathan Leakeours time. In my mind, it keeps us united in some intangible way. AC. - under re-construction
NASA is to embark on one of its most ambitious missions in an attempt to unlock the secrets of the sun.
Following
its launch in nine days’ time, the US space agency’s Solar Dynamics
Observatory (SDO) will spend five years in orbit trying to discover the
causes of extreme solar activity, such as sun spots and solar winds and
flares.
Scientists have long been aware that disturbances on the sun can trigger dangerous x-rays, charged particles and magnetic fields that can disrupt power supplies, communication signals and aircraft navigation systems on Earth.
By
understanding how such solar phenomena are created, they hope to be
able to produce reliable forecasts of “space weather” and provide
advance warnings of any threat.
Orbiting
the Earth at a distance of 22,300 miles, the observatory will measure
fluctuations in the sun’s ultraviolet output, map magnetic fields and
photograph its surface and atmosphere.
Experts
have likened the mission to a “giant microscope” that will capture for
the first time every nuance of the sun’s exterior. The images relayed
to Earth will be 10 times clearer than high-definition television.
Barbara
Thompson, project scientist, said: “It is Nasa’s first weather mission
and it aims to characterise everything on the sun that can impact on
the Earth and near Earth. “We know things happen on the sun which
affect spacecraft, communications and radio signals. If we can
understand the underlying causes of what is happening then we can turn
this information into forecasts. “The key thing about the mission is
that it is not just pure science for its own sake. There is likely to
be a direct and immediate benefit for people.”
Solar magnetic storms and space weather disturbances have had a number of dramatic consequences over the years.
On
March 13, 1989, millions of people in Canada and the United States were
left without electricity for more than nine hours after a magnetic
storm sent shockwaves through the Hydro-Québec power grid.
Five
years later, a geomagnetic storm temporarily knocked out two Canadian
satellites and Intelsat-K, an international communications satellite.
The
most powerful solar storm in history, known as a “superstorm”, occurred
on September 1, 1859. It caused the failure of telegraph systems in
Europe and North America.
The
storm produced auroras — phenomena normally only seen near the poles —
which were visible in Cuba, Mexico and Italy. The lights were so bright
in California’s Rocky Mountains that gold prospectors mistook them for
dawn and began preparing breakfast.
Transpolar
aircraft are particularly sensitive to space weather because they rely
on navigation systems for the entire duration of a flight.
Nasa
estimates that the SDO will transmit as much as 50 times more
scientific data than any other mission in the space agency’s history.
Each
image will consist of more than 16m pixels and the amount of data sent
back to Earth daily will be equivalent to downloading 500,000 songs a
day from the internet.
In order to process the data, the organisation has set up a pair of dedicated radio antennae near Las Cruces, New Mexico.
The
SDO’s orbit will match the speed of the rotation of the Earth, meaning
that it will be in constant view of the two 59ft dishes throughout the
mission.
The UK-based Science and Technology Facilities Council is supplying some of the equipment for the observatory.
Professor
Richard Harrison, of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire,
said understanding the impact of the sun’s magnetic fields was key to
the mission.
“The
idea is to image different layers of the sun’s atmosphere all the way
down to the surface and measure magnetic fields,” he said.
“The
bottom line is that you are trying to understand how this atmosphere
works. We can already see phenomena like the flares. The question is
how does the magnetic field form to allow this sort of thing to happen.”
Related photos / videos
The object, known as P/2010 A2, was circling about 90 million miles (144 million km) from Earth in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter when it was spotted last week by the Hubble Space Telescope. "The truth is we're still struggling to understand what this means," lead scientist David Jewitt with the University of California at Los Angeles, told Reuters on Tuesday. "It's most likely the result of a recent collision between two asteroids."
If so, he said, "It'd be the first case we've seen of an asteroid smash happening, basically caught in the act."
The
object resembles a comet, but its nucleus is severed from its tail,
which "has a very strange appearance, the likes of which we've never
seen before," Jewitt said
Studies
of the object -- and searches for similar ones -- would improve
scientists' understanding of how asteroids break apart, information
that may be useful to thwart a future asteroid strike on Earth. "The
thing that we want to understand is how the asteroids smash into each
other and destroy each other," Jewett said. "It might help us
understand even how to destroy an asteroid and prevent one from hitting
us."
Scientists
believe a giant comet or asteroid that hit Earth about 65 million years
ago was linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs, possibly by throwing
up dust or chemical clouds that blocked the sun or by igniting global
wildfires.
Calculations
show the orbit of P/2010 A2 is related to the group of asteroids, known
at the Flora family, that produced that asteroid.
NASA
is working to catalogue at least 90 percent of the estimated 1,000
objects that approach Earth and are larger across than one kilometre,
about two-thirds of a mile. The agency's proposed budget for the year
beginning October 1 includes a $16 million (10 million pound) annual
increase to step up that effort.
(Editing by Jane Sutton and Peter Cooney)
We will find 'twins of Earth' this year, says astronomer Michel Mayor Hannah Devlin
Scientists
will have detected the first truly Earth-like planet outside the solar
system by the end of the year, one of the world’s leading astronomers
predicted yesterday.
Professor
Michel Mayor, of Geneva University, who led the team that discovered
the first extrasolar planet (or exoplanet) in 1995, said he was
confident that a planet of a similar size and composition to Earth
would be found in the near future.
Addressing
a Royal Society conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the Search
for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme, he said: “The
search for twins of Earth is motivated by the ultimate prospect of
finding sites with favourable conditions for the development of life.
We’ve entered a new phase in this search.”
He
told the audience, which included representatives from Nasa, the
European Space Agency and the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, that
dramatic technological progress over the past 15 years had led to the
discovery of more than 400 exoplanets orbiting stars similar to the Sun
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- However, very few if any of the the planets discovered so far are likely to be viable candidates for incubating life, as most of them are too large. Very large planets are likely to have very active tectonic plates, making for a highly turbulent environment. To date, the smallest exoplanet found is 1.7 times the mass of the Earth.
- A further condition for a planet to be habitable is that it orbits its star at such a distance that its water would be liquid. “If the planet’s too close, it will be blazing hot and all the water will evaporate and if it’s too far away, it will be ice,” Professor Mayor sai
- He
said that Nasa’s Kepler spacecraft, which is carrying the largest
telescope to have been sent beyond the Earth’s orbit, will be the first
to find a planet that meets both these criteria.
The
telescope, which has been in orbit around the Sun since March last
year, is focused on a dense star field in the Orion spiral arm of the
Milky Way. Monitoring more than 100,000 stars every half-hour for three
years, it is looking for variations in the brightness of stars caused
by planets as small as Earth passing in front of them.
Within about four years Kepler is likely to have found planets of the same size as Earth that are also in the “habitable zone”.
Professor
Paul Davies, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, also spoke.
“When I was a student, I couldn’t find anyone who took the idea of life
elsewhere in the Universe seriously. Now it’s pretty much the party
line in the scientific community. A big part of that has been the
discovery of extrasolar planets,” he said.
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