Astronomy News
Courtesy of Astronomy
Ground teams are preparing for the final part of launch dress rehearsal for the STS-129 mission to the International Space Station.
LCROSS science instruments worked exceedingly well and returned a wealth of data that will greatly improve our understanding of the Moon.
Despite public disappointment over the lack of a visible debris plume, NASA remains confident of the mission's success.
Astronomy's Out-of-this-world Award recognizes excellence in astronomy outreach. The winning group receives $2,500 to put toward their public programming.
Senior NASA and contractor managers assessed the risks associated with the mission and determined the shuttle's equipment, support systems, and procedures are ready.
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Astrophysics News
Courtesy of Science Daily
Astronomers were looking through seven-year-old data when they chanced upon a very strange supernova that flashed and was gone in less than a month, when 3-4 months is typical. The unusually rapid supernova appears to match the predicted behavior of a thermonuclear explosion on a white dwarf that is drawing helium from its binary companion. This mechanism is quite different from the two standard types of supernovae.
The operations of the CoRoT mission has been extended for three additional years, until 31 March 2013.
The spectacular new camera installed on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope during Servicing Mission 4 in May has delivered the most detailed view of star birth in the graceful, curving arms of the nearby spiral galaxy M83. Nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel, M83 is undergoing more rapid star formation than our own Milky Way galaxy, especially in its nucleus.
Evidence for a thin veil of carbon has been found on the neutron star in the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant. This discovery resolves a ten-year mystery surrounding this object. In Earth's time frame, the estimated age of the neutron star in Cas A is only several hundred years, making it about ten times younger than other neutron stars with detected surface emission. Therefore, the Cas A neutron star gives a unique window into the early life of a cooling neutron star.
Astronomers have tracked down a gigantic, previously unknown assembly of galaxies located almost seven billion light-years away from us. The discovery, made possible by combining two of the most powerful ground-based telescopes in the world, is the first observation of such a prominent galaxy structure in the distant Universe, providing further insight into the cosmic web and how it formed.
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Solar System News
Courtesy of Science Daily
Is there such a thing as "weather" on Mars? There are some doubts, considering the planet's atmosphere is only 1 percent as dense as that of the Earth. Mars, however, definitely has clouds, drastically low temperatures and out-of-this-world dust storms. A professor of atmospheric sciences now hopes to analyze and forecast Martian weather.
Dust samples collected from the stratosphere have yielded an unexpectedly rich trove of relicts from the ancient cosmos, scientists report. The dust includes presolar grains and material from interstellar molecular clouds. This "ultra-primitive" material likely wafted into the atmosphere after the Earth passed through the trail of an Earth-crossing comet in 2003, giving scientists a rare opportunity to study cometary dust in the laboratory.
A new image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows channels to the southeast of Hale crater on southern Mars. Taken by the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, this view covers an area about 3 kilometers (2 miles) wide.
During flights simulating the moon's low gravity, researchers find that sifters can separate soil particles and produce the best feedstock for an oxygen generator. Scientists are designing and testing components of the generator, which would provide oxygen needed for a lunar or Martian outpost.
Galileo knew he had discovered a new planet in 1613, 234 years before its official discovery date, according to a new theory.
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The spectacular new camera installed on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope during Servicing Mission 4 in May has delivered the most detailed view of star birth in the graceful, curving arms of the nearby spiral galaxy M83. Nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel, M83 is undergoing more rapid star formation than our own Milky Way galaxy, especially in its nucleus.
Is there such a thing as "weather" on Mars? There are some doubts, considering the planet's atmosphere is only 1 percent as dense as that of the Earth. Mars, however, definitely has clouds, drastically low temperatures and out-of-this-world dust storms. A professor of atmospheric sciences now hopes to analyze and forecast Martian weather.
Nearby galaxies undergoing a furious pace of star formation also emit lots of gamma rays, say astronomers using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Two so-called "starburst" galaxies, plus a satellite of our own Milky Way galaxy, represent a new category of gamma-ray-emitting objects detected both by Fermi and ground-based observatories.
Until Oct. 24, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover had gone more than six months without an episode of amnesia-like symptoms like those that appeared on four occasions earlier this year. In these amnesia events, Spirit fails to record data from the day's activities onto the type of computer memory -- non-volatile "flash" memory -- that can retain the data when the rover powers down for its energy-conserving periods of "sleep."
A new image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows channels to the southeast of Hale crater on southern Mars. Taken by the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, this view covers an area about 3 kilometers (2 miles) wide.
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