NASA today announced the astronaut assignments for the upcoming STS-122 space shuttle mission, tentatively scheduled for October 2007. The commander will be Stephen N. Frick, and the pilot will be Alan G. Poindexter. The mission specialists will be Rex J. Walheim, Stanley G. Love, Leland D. Melvin and European Space Agency astronaut Hans Schlegel. During this mission, the space shuttle will deliver the European Space Agency’s Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station.
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Earthlike Regions on Titan
New radar images of Titan show surprisingly familiar terrain on Saturn’s largest moon. The radar images show a strip 4,500 km (2,796 miles) long, straight through the Xanadu region. Some images show hills, valleys and dark sand dunes cut by river networks – the similarity to Earth is striking. Of course, Titan is so cold it can’t be water; these rivers are probably formed by liquid methane or ethane. Cassini will return to Titan on Saturday, July 22 and capture images of the northern latitudes.
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At the Centre of the Milky Way
You’re looking at the heart of your own galaxy with X-ray specs. This photograph was captured by NASA’s Chandra X-Ray observatory, and shows the three massive star clusters that surround the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. These star clusters have so many large, bright stars that the whole area blazes in the X-ray spectrum. This photo shows 1 million seconds of accumulated observing time by Chandra of these mysterious region of our galaxy.
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Powerful Explosion is a Taste of What’s to Come
Earlier this year, astronomers watched a nova explosion blast off the surface of a white dwarf star in the system RS Ophiuchi. Located 5,000 light-years from Earth, RS Ophiuchi consists of a white dwarf and a red giant star locked in orbit – the white dwarf might actually be orbiting within the envelope of the red giant. But this nova was just the taste of what’s to come. The white dwarf is drawing material away from the red giant, and it will eventually gather enough mass to explode as a supernova.
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Is Proxima Centauri Flying Solo?
If you want to send an interstellar probe, you’re going to chose the closest star. And that would be Proxima Centauri, located only 4.2 light years away. Since they first calculated its distance, astronomers have always assumed that Proxima Centauri was part of the Alpha Centauri triple star system. But recent calculations threw that assumption into doubt. Was its location purely a coincidence? Is Proxima Centauri flying solo through the Milky Way?
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Cluster Spacecraft Catch a Magnetic Reconnection
ESA’s Cluster spacecraft were in the right place at the right time on September 15, 2001. They flew through a region of the Earth’s magnetosphere at the exact moment that it reconfigured itself. The wealth of data will help scientists better model interactions between the Earth’s magnetosphere and the solar wind, as well as the magnetic fields around other stars and exotic objects with powerful magnetic fields.
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Genesis 1 Carrying a NASA Experiment
Bigelow Aerospace’s inflatable Genesis 1 habitat has a stowaway on board; an experiment for NASA called Genebox. This shoebox-sized experiment will allow NASA to measure the effects of near weightlessness on the genetic structure of microorganisms. Although this is the first Genebox, NASA is planning to launch several of them over the next few years as part of the Vision for Space Exploration.
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Explore Mars With Swarms of Rolling Minibots
MIT engineers and scientists are working on a strategy that could unleash a swarm of baseball sized robots onto the surface of Mars. These microbots would would be completely self contained with scientific instruments, and capable of rolling and hopping long distances on a mini fuel cell. One advantage to these rovers is that they could be sent into very dangerous locations – like lavatubes – since operators wouldn’t be too worried about losing a few.
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What’s Up this Week: July 17 – July 23, 2006
Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! As the Moon slowly leaves the scene the observing heats up as we take a look at some of the Summer’s finest objects as we tour star clusters and nebula. Get out those telescopes and binoculars, because…
Here’s what’s up!
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Iani Chaos on Mars
This image captured by ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft shows the Iani Chaos region on Mars, east of Valles Marineris. The region is dominated by large, heavily weathered mesas (flattened hills). On the left side of the image, these mesas are about 1 km tall and are up to 8 km wide. The terrain might have been formed by the collapse of the ground after subsurface water or ice was removed.
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