The latest image released from the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft is of Kasei Vallis; one of the largest outflow channels on Mars. The image was taken using the spacecraft's High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) while it was cruising above the planet at an altitude of 272 km. It's believed that the outflow channel was carved by glaciers, or the bursting of subterranean lakes which were dammed by glaciers. Operators had a difficult time building a true-colour image from this photograph because of all the dust and haze in the atmosphere at the time.
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Construction of the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory is well underway, and engineers recently completed a significant part of what will become the largest mirror on a space telescope. The 3.5 metre primary mirror was built from silicon carbide, which reduces its mass by a factor of 5 from using traditional materials. The mirror will next be machined to reduce its mass even more and then coated with a reflective surface. Herschel is due to launch in February 2007, and will cover the far infrared and sub-millimetre waveband.
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NASA has postponed the test of its X-43 prototype because of a problem with the aircraft's rudder. The 4-metre X-43 is affixed to the front of a Pegasus rocket which will be launched from a B-52 aircraft. Once the X-43 is accelerated to Mach 7 on the rocket, it will use its scramjet engine to fly under its own power. Unlike traditional rocket engines, scramjets don't need to carry oxygen to burn rocket fuel. The aircraft uses its speed to compress air from the atmosphere and use this to burn fuel. This allows a scramjet to save weight and carry more cargo. It's unknown when the repairs to the prototype will be completed.
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If you have clear skies on the early evening of Monday, February 23, get outside and look to the West for a beautiful sight. You can't miss Venus and a crescent Moon blazing in the Western sky, right beside each other. The Moon will only have 15% of its surface illuminated, and Venus is so bright right now, that the two objects may look equally bright. You might even be able to see the reflected light of the Earth shining on the Moon, revealing its complete circular shape. Don't miss it.
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NASA's Opportunity rover dug into the Martian soil today, to get a better idea of the composition of the minerals beneath the top layer. The maneuver was done by locking five of the rover's six wheels and then turning the sixth in place to scoop soil like a waterwheel. After Opportunity completed the dig, scientists were able to confirm that the rover had dug down approximately 8-10 centimetres into the Martian soil. Its next operation will be to examine the unearthed dirt with its array of instruments.
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According to researcher Ralph Lorenz, Saturn's moon Titan could help teach scientists about how oceans and weather work on the Earth. Titan is thought to have oceans of liquid methane, but they are created under a completely different environment from our own familiar oceans. When Cassini and the Huygens probe arrive at the Saturn system in 2004, they will begin gathering data about Titan and its oceans and weather, and help answer questions like: how deep are its oceans? do they form steep cliffs or shallow beaches? and what effect does Saturn's huge gravity have?
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Here's a new desktop wallpaper (1024x768 resolution) of the latest rock visited by NASA's rover Spirit, which scientists have dubbed "White Boat". The rock stood out to scientists because of its unusual shape and colour compared to the other darker rocks around it. Spirit's next task will be to make a "mega drive" 25 metres towards a nearby crater called "Bonneville". On the other side of Mars, Opportunity completed a 9 metre drive, and is getting set to trench out a spot of soil rich in hematite. Both rovers should send back a mountain of scientific data for the folks on Earth to analyze.
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Since Earth and Mars were probably formed much the same way; through the accretion of rocky material from the inner solar system, they should have roughly the same amount of water, but Mars is pretty much bone dry compared to the Earth. So what happened to make it so dry? Some scientists believe that Mars used to have the same amount of water as Earth, but it evaporated into space. Others believe that the Red Planet never had much water in the first place; that it started out as a collection of dry materials from the asteroid belt.
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A Boeing-built Titan IV-B rocket lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral on Saturday afternoon, carrying a Defense Support Program satellite into orbit. The rocket lifted off at 1850 UTC (1:50 pm EST), and the satellite was placed into a geosynchronous orbit seven hours later. The DSP-22 satellite is equipped with sensitive heat detection instruments, designed to spot the heat of launching missiles. This constellation of military satellites first launched in the 1970s, and the final one is due to go up in early 2005.
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An international team of astronomers have found what could be the most distant galaxy ever discovered. Located 13 billion light-years away, it's being seen when the Universe was only 750 million years old. The object was found by combining the power of the Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck telescope; they also used the natural gravitational lensing effect of a relatively nearby galaxy, which focused the light of the more distant galaxy. This galaxy is small - only 2,000 light-years across - but it's forming stars at a furious rate.
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The European Space Agency has picked a special image taken by Envisat for Valentine's Day. The radar image is of a land feature called Sebkha Te-n-Dghamcha, which is a large depression in the Sahara Desert. The region once contained a lake, but it evaporated, and now all that remains are shallow ponds of salty water.
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A new theory from University of Arizona researcher Xiaohui Fan predicts that the supermassive black holes which form the core of most galaxies were created only 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only 6% of its current age. Fan used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to analyze the light of distant quasars, as far away as 13 billion light-years. He found that they contained light elements like hydrogen and helium, but also heavier elements like carbon and iron, which shouldn't have formed so early. But they could be explained if these black holes formed so early.
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NASA and the European Space Agency have demonstrated that their spacecraft can talk to each other. In a recent test, the ESA's Mars Express orbiter transferred data and commands to NASA's Spirit rover. The commands for the rover were transferred from Spirit's control centre at JPL to the ESA's operations centre in Darmstadt Germany and then transmitted to Mars Express, which connected to Spirit on the surface of Mars. Spirit then transmitted back to Mars Express, and the communications went in reverse. The two agencies planned this demonstration as part of their ongoing work to cooperate in space.
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An instrument on board NASA's Spirit rover has detected warm air thermals rising off the surface of Mars; the first time this has been seen on the Red Planet. Thermals on Earth work to create wind, so by analyzing the temperature and speed of these thermals, it will better help scientists understand wind dynamics on Mars. On the other side of the planet, Opportunity has found unusual blueberry-shaped formations in the soil, and scientists are studying them to understand the soil's development.
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Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have found a diamond in space, and it's big? really big. The object, technically known as BPM 37093, is a crystallized white dwarf star approximately 4,000 km across. The astronomers call it a diamond, because it's made up of crystallized carbon surrounded by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gasses. It's believed that this is the final outcome for many stars, including our own Sun. In five billion years our Sun will become a white dwarf and two billion years after that the carbon should crystallize to form a gigantic diamond.
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Just in time for Valentine's Day, here's a 1024x768 wallpaper of nebula NGC 7129 taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope - it looks like a pink rosebud. Previous images of this nebula taken by optical telescopes just look like a few stars surrounded by a haze of gas. By viewing the nebula in infrared light, astronomers are able to see which stars have swirling rings of material around them that will eventually form planets.
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Officials announced today that they have given up search for the Beagle 2 lander, which was supposed to have landed on Mars on December 25, 2003. The spacecraft stopped communicating when it entered the planet's atmosphere, and months of searching with several Mars orbiters and Earth-based radio telescopes have failed to turn up any signal. The ESA and UK Science Minister Lord Sainsbury said that an inquiry will begin shortly to look into the failure of the lander.
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Astronomers have found several examples of galaxies which bend and focus the light from a more distant object, like a quasar. These are called gravitational lenses and they can reveal details that would just be a smudge to the most powerful telescopes. A recently discovered lensing galaxy called PMN J1632-0033 is unusual because the light from a distant quasar passes so close to the heart of the galaxy that the focused image can reveal information about the supermassive black hole in PMN J1632-0033.
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The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft was mated to launch hardware that will eventually be connected to the top of its Ariane 5, in preparation for its February 26 launch. If all goes well, Rosetta will blast off from the space centre in Kourou, French Guiana and begin its long journey to meet up with Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. The launch will give the 3,000 kg spacecraft enough velocity to make its escape trajectory, but it will still need to make two gravity assisting flybys of Earth, and one past Mars to get enough speed to reach the comet.
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NASA's Opportunity rover is continuing to examine the exposed bedrock at the edge of the crater. The first images showed that the rock has parallel layers that could be sediments created by standing water, but closer inspection shows that the lines converge and diverge at low angles. This gives clues that something moving probably created these rocks, like volcanic flow or a river. Both rovers will continue searching their landing sites and nearby environment for evidence of past water on Mars - something that might have supported life at one time.
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New research from NASA shows that cities in the United States have been built on the most fertile soils of the nation - cities account for just 3% of its land area, but food grown there could out produce the 29% of the US which is currently used for agriculture. The researchers used data two NASA satellites to track plant growth and the locations of urban centres. They created a computer model for a potential pre-urban US landscape which they used to calculate how much the country's vegetation growth is diminished because of cities.
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Now in orbit for more than a month, the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has been delivering mountains of data back to Earth. Here's a beautiful desktop wallpaper you can use for your computer: an image taken on January 21, 2004 of the caldera of Olympus Mons, the largest known mountain in the Solar System. Olympus Mons is 22 km high and the caldera has a depth of 3 km.
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Many of the sky's most interesting objects, like gamma-ray bursts and supernovae, change within days or even hours. It's very difficult for traditional observatories to dedicate the kind of time required to watch the evolution of these objects, but a new class of instruments will help astronomers stay on top of them. ULTRACAM will track changes in brightness that last only a thousandths of a second, while Super WASP can watch an area of sky 1000x the size of the Moon, looking for anything unusual. And a new network of robotic telescopes could be the best tool for spotting Earth-like planets around other stars until big space observatories are launched in the next decade.
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Using a NASA aircraft which flies over the Arctic, Harvard scientists have made observations of a molecule which is believed to be responsible for destroying stratospheric ozone. The substance is called chlorine peroxide, and it's formed from industrial materials used in refrigeration. These have been banned for several years, but they can persist in the high atmosphere for decades. This new data will allow scientists to better forecast the future degradation of the ozone layer, and regions which might let in more solar radiation.
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After it had finished examining "Adirondack", NASA's Spirit rover drove right over it and kept on moving for another 6.4 metres. This was the first test of the rover's autonomous navigation system, which steered it clear of rocks as it moved towards a crater 250 metres away. Opportunity completed its journey to the rocky outcropping on the side of the crater that the rover landed in. Close examination of the bedrock showed strange spheres of sand embedded into the layers of rock.
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NASA has swapped out the next crew headed for the International Space Station. Astronaut Michael Fincke and cosmonaut Gennady Padalka will be replacing Russian Valery Tokarev and American Leroy Chiao. Russian space officials said that it wasn't because the team was unprofessional or ill, just that it hadn't had enough time to be ready for space - Leroy Chiao was only added to the team last month when astronaut William McArthur fell ill. Fincke and Padalka are due to blast off on from the Baikonur cosmodrome with Dutchman Andre Kuipers in a Soyuz rocket on April 19.
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Canadian government and business officials today announced the development of a new microsatellite called CASSIOPE which will serve a dual role in science and commercial communications. Scheduled for launch in 2007, CASSIOPE will carry a suite of eight scientific instruments called ePOP to study the effect of the Sun on the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field. The satellite will also serve as a high bandwidth information courier, picking up data and delivering it to anywhere in the world.
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Astronomers from several US universities have developed a scenario where colliding black holes could be ejected from their galaxy. When two galaxies merge, their central supermassive black holes will orbit one another and eventually collide. When this merge happens, the radiation pressure is so large that it could theoretically knock the black hole out of the centre of the galaxy. Although it should be incredibly rare, it could be possible to spot a black hole in a recently merged galaxy which isn't at the centre where it normally belongs.
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NASA engineers commanded the Opportunity rover to drive forward 3.5 metres from its previous position towards the rocky outcrop on the side of the Martian crater. Instead of digging a trench into the soil, the mission scientists have decided they want to go directly to the outcrop to get some close up pictures. On the other side of Mars, the controllers for Spirit have successfully reformatted its flash memory, which should fix all remaining traces of the problem that plagued the rover over the last few weeks.
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An Atlas IIAS rocket successfully launched the AMC-10 satellite on Thursday evening from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket lifted off at 2346 UTC (6:46 pm EST), and the satellite separated 28 minutes later. The launch was delayed nearly and hour because of problems with a helium valve. Lockheed Martin built the AMC-10 satellite, which will provide regular and high-definition television broadcasting services in the US.
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Researchers from the University of Queensland believe they have more evidence that supports the theory that NASA researchers found life in a Martian meteorite back in 1996. Their new technique uses an electron microscope to see through the bacteria and into the gel surrounding the magnetic crystals inside the creature. Their research indicates that the bacteria likely lived four billion years ago, before life was even believed to have formed here on Earth. Their research was published in the Journal of Microscopy.
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The European Space Agency has given the lander portion of the Rosetta mission a name: Philae. This is the name of an island in the Nile where a French explorer, Jean-Fran?ois Champollion, discovered an obelisk with a bilingual inscription of the names Cleopatra and Ptolemy. This gave Champollion the clues he needed to decipher the Rosetta stone, and begin translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The name was proposed by a 15-year old girl from Italy. If all goes well, Rosetta will lift off on February 26 to begin its 10-year mission to reach and land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
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Scientists on Earth have investigated the microscopic pictures of Martian soil returned by NASA's Opportunity rover, and found features that are unlike anything seen on Mars before, including spherical particles that could have been formed by the erosion of water. Opportunity also used its instruments to create a mineral map of the area, and discovered large quantities of hematite right at the surface, especially near the rim of the crater which the rover landed in. Engineers will have the rover drive forward about 3 metres - halfway to the outcrop of rock - and dig a trench with its wheel to see material down a few centimetres.
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The latest image released from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals spiral galaxy M64 in a new light. Nicknamed the "Black Eye" galaxy because of the dark bands of obscuring clouds, M64 is well known to amateur astronomers because of how it looks in small telescopes. What's unique to M64 is that the stars rotate in one direction, while the interstellar gas in the outer regions goes in the opposite direction - likely the outcome of a galactic collision.
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The newest photo released from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the nearby dwarf galaxy NGC 1569, which is a hotbed of vigorous star birth activity. These stellar nurseries blow huge bubbles of gas and dust that riddle the structure of the galaxy. NGC 1569 is only 7 million light-years away, so astronomers can study the galaxy in great detail.
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Some of the first images sent back to Earth by NASA's Opportunity rover are of exposed layered rock which could have been formed gradually by water - where there's water, there could have been life. Astrobiologist Andrew Knoll is a science team member with the rover missions, and a Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. He explains how scientists search for extreme life on Earth, and how discoveries here could help the rovers spot evidence of past life on Mars.
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NASA's Opportunity rover took a close look at the Martian soil near its landing site yesterday with its microscope, and controllers released the first colour images today. What's unusual about the soil is just how many spherical-shaped particles there are. There are only a few processes which can create this shape of particles, such as the gentle rolling at the bottom of an ocean. It's possible for a volcano or asteroid impact to create spherical particles; globs of lava can freeze in mid-air as they're ejected. The largest pebble in this image is approximately 3 mm across.
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A team of astronomers have discovered what seem to be clouds of hydrogen gas which were left over when the Andromeda galaxy formed. The clouds were discovered using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), which is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope. Galaxies like Andromeda, and our own Milky Way, were thought to have formed by the continuous merging of smaller galaxies as well as the accretion of clouds of hydrogen. Astronomers had been unable to find these clouds until now.
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Using satellite data, scientists think they might have a way to give some advance warning of landslides, which kill hundreds of people around the world every year. Scientists know that regions which are about to turn into a landslide can shift slightly. Local observers would never notice a few millimeters of movement, but it's possible for satellites to track it from space using a technique called radar interferometry. Analysts compare multiple images of the same location which allows them to highlight regions which have shifted slightly.
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NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced on Monday that seven hills to the east of the Spirit rover's landing site would be named for the astronauts who lost their lives when the space shuttle Columbia was destroyed. The hills are between 3 and 5 kilometres away from Spirit's landing spot, and NASA will submit them to the International Astronomical Union for official designation.
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At the end of February 2004, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft is expected to launch on board an Ariane 5 launcher from the space centre in Kourou, French Guiana. Rosetta will travel 675 million kilometres, including multiple planet flybys to reach Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014 - it will orbit the comet and then actually land on its surface. This journey will be a long time coming, since Rosetta has been in development since 1997, and missed several launch opportunities.
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Both of NASA's twin rovers are now ready to perform a scientific study of Mars with the suite of tools at the end of their robotic arms. Opportunity extended its arm for the first time today, while Spirit has been locked with its arm stretched out for the last few weeks. Controllers will have Opportunity examine a patch of soil right in front with its microscope and Moessbauer Spectrometer, and then it will turn the arm and look at another patch with its alpha particle X-ray spectrometer. This should tell scientists back at Earth what minerals are in the soil.
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After 10 days of recovery work, engineers at NASA have given Spirit a clean bill of health; the rover is now booting up normally. The recovery happened after controllers deleted thousands of files loaded up in the rover's memory; most of which was stored up from the seven-month flight from the Earth to Mars. The engineers are still planning to completely wipe the memory to start with a clean slate, and then reinstall all the software. Spirit will continue examining a rock called Adirondack later this week with its suite of scientific tools.
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An unmanned Russian Progress cargo ship docked with the International Space Station on Saturday, delivering over two tones of food, water, fuel, supplies and scientific equipment. Progress 13 automatically docked to the Zvezda Service Module at 1313 UTC (8:13am EST) Saturday afternoon. This is the first spacecraft to visit the station since astronaut Michael Foale and cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri were launched more than 100 days ago.
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Astronomers made news in early 2003 with a precise measurement for the age of the Universe - 13.7 billion years - using data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite. But new research from the University of Durham indicates that our view into the past might be skewed by clusters of galaxies which seem to be in regions where the microwave energy is lower. It's possible that hot gas in the galaxy clusters is interfering with photons from the Big Bang, and has corrupted the microwave map of the sky. These results may undermine theories about how the early Universe was dominated by dark matter and dark energy.
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Michael Benson, author of Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes (
read Universe Today's review) took some time from his busy schedule, and nasty cold, to answer some of our questions about his book and interest in astronomy and space exploration. Benson was interviewed by
Mark Mortimer.
New data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope shows that a previously discovered extrasolar gas giant which has oxygen and carbon in its atmosphere evaporating at a tremendous rate. The planet - officially called HD 209458; unofficially "Osiris" - orbits its star at only 7 million km and has created an extended ellipse of material around the star. This discovery has caused astronomers to propose a new kind of object called a cthonian: the dead cores of gas giants which have been stripped of their atmosphere.
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