On Tuesday, June 8, observers in Europe, Asia and Africa will be treated to a very rare event in astronomy: a transit of Venus across the surface of the Sun. The transit will begin at approximately 0520 UTC, and wrap up approximately 6 hours later. Don't look directly at the Sun, or through a telescope without a proper filter, as you can severely damage your eyes. The last transit happened on December 6, 1882, and the next will occur in 8 years; it will be visible from the Americas.
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NASA's Opportunity rover is hard at work analyzing the rock that was blasted out of the "Endurance" crater. One rock, dubbed "Lion Stone" is unlike any of the others in the region. It was likely formed under wet conditions, like the exposed rock in Eagle Crater (where Opportunity landed), but it's a little different in mineralogy and colour. It might give researchers more conditions about the environment previous to the Eagle Crater rocks. NASA is still deciding whether or not to send the rover into the crater, as it might not be able to climb back out again.
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Approximately 250 million years ago, something nearly wiped out life on Earth; 90% of marine animals and 80% of land animals were snuffed out in the geologic blink of an eye. Researchers now believe they've found the culprit: an 8 to 11 km (5 to 7 mile) asteroid that stuck the Earth off the coast of Australia. The impact happened so long ago, there isn't a crater, but geologists have found several clues that lead to this spot, including deposits of "shocked quartz" which can only be formed in a violent event like an asteroid strike.
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One of the big goals of astronomy is to answer the question: are we alone? In order to find out the answer, NASA is planning to launch two separate space observatories within the next 10-15 years which will be capable of finding Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. Terrestrial Planet Finder-C will be a moderately sized optical telescope launched by 2014 capable of blocking the glare from a star in order to be able to see planets orbiting it. Planet Finder-I will launch by 2020, and comprise multiple spacecraft flying in formation which will simulate a much larger observatory.
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Orbital Recovery has signed a long term contract with Arianespace to launch five of its space tugs as secondary payloads on future Ariane 5 launches. The ConeXpress Orbital Life Extension Vehicles (CX OLEV) will dock with satellites in geostationary orbit which are running out of fuel and take over the process of station keeping, which keeps the satellite in position and pointed at the same spot on the Earth. This will allow satellite operators to continue getting revenue from an otherwise perfectly functioning spacecraft.
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European astronomers have found a large disc of dust and gas in nebula M 17, which seems to be forming a huge star, 30-40 times larger than our Sun. Astronomers have long known that low mass stars (like our own Sun) form from discs, but it wasn't clear if huge stars do this too. The disc has 110 times the mass of our Sun, and was seen as a dark silhouette against a hot region of the nebula. The disc has a diameter of 0.31 light-years, which is 500 times larger than the orbit of Pluto.
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As Cassini nears Saturn, new details are becoming clearer, including the banded clouds that make up the planet's atmosphere. When Cassini took this latest image on April 16, it was 38.5 million kilometers (23.9 million miles) away. It's close enough now that the entire planet no long fits inside a single frame of the spacecraft's narrow angle camera. The banded clouds follow Saturn's lines of latitude, which are created by the planet's rotation. Cassini will reach Saturn in July, 2004.
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String theorists have a problem. They have a set of theories which could explain how all the forces in the Universe are connected. Unfortunately, it depends on the existence of tiny vibrating strings which are so small they could never be seen directly. One strategy, proposed by physicists from Yale, would be to look at the afterglow from the Big Bang, which covers the entire sky. The small strings could project much larger shadows onto this radiation which would be light-years across, and detectable from Earth.
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The European Space Agency's Proba satellite has taken a high resolution image of a segment of the Great Wall of China. There has been much debate about whether or not the wall is visible from space; Yang Liwei, China's first spacefarer, wasn't able to see it. Astronaut Eugene Cernan said that at an altitude of 160 km (100 miles), he was able to see it. Proba orbits at an altitude of 600 km (372 miles), and was designed to demonstrate several Earth observation techniques.
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Astronomers have had plenty of time to observe the fluctuations of the Sun, but until now, it's been unclear if other stars go through the same cycles. But new data gathered by the ESA's XMM-Newton X-Ray Observatory has found a similar cycle of radiation in a distant star. The X-ray brightness of HD 81809, located 90 light-years away in the constellation of Hydra, has varied 10 times over the past 2 and a half years, reaching a well defined peak in mid 2002 - just like the Sun's 11 year cycle of sunspot activity.
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A new image released from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows the giant elliptical galaxy M87. Bright jets can be seen at the heart of the galaxy, which are generated by a supermassive black hole, and it looks like it's been actively reshaping the galaxy for hundreds of millions of years. Two circular rings are visible extending away from the centre of the galaxy, and were likely caused by two massive explosions millions of years ago.
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Here's a 1024x768 desktop wallpaper of a new nebula image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Its technical designation is HD 44179, but it's better known to astronomers as the "Red Rectangle" because of its unusual shape when seen from ground-based telescopes. The star at the heart of the nebula began like our own Sun, but now it's shedding off layers into space, and nearing the end of its life.
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As a show of support for President Bush's space exploration initiative, 13 US space advocacy and policy groups have formed an alliance. The groups include: Aerospace Industries Association, Aerospace States Association, American Astronautical Society, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, California Space Authority, Florida Space Authority, The Mars Society, National Coalition of Spaceport States, National Space Society, The Planetary Society, ProSpace, Space Access Society and Space Frontier Foundation. The first goal for the group will be to gain broad congressional support for the new vision - perhaps it won't be difficult considering the groups have 1 million members combined.
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NASA named its latest batch of astronauts; the 11 candidates include three teachers, who were selected from over 1,000 candidates. The introduction of the new astronauts comes at a time when the space shuttle fleet is still grounded because of the Columbia disaster - they probably won't fly until 2009. The candidates are Joseph Acaba, Thomas Marshburn, Christopher Cassidy, R. Shane Kimbrough, Jose Hernandez, Robert Satcher, Shannon Walker, James Dutton, and Randolph Bresnik.
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European astronomers have confirmed a new class of objects, known as "very hot Jupiters", which are large, extremely hot, and orbit their parent star in an orbit that only takes a couple of days. They used the "transit method", which measure the brightness of a star over a long period of time to watch for a periodic dimming; an indication that a planet is passing in front. As part of a new survey of 155,000 stars, the astronomers have found 137 transit candidates, and confirmed 2 planets so far using other techniques for finding extrasolar planets.
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NASA is currently making a difficult decision about whether to send its Opportunity rover down into Endurance Crater, which is 130 metres wide, and deep enough that the rover might not be able to climb back out. It's clear that there's some interesting science to be gathered in the crater, including more exposed rock surfaces. Opportunity will crawl around the rim of the crater and search for an ideal ramp that it could use to enter and exit safely.
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X Prize candidate Canadian Arrow announced this week that they will begin unmanned flight tests of its rocket this summer. Over the course of four months, beginning in August, the team will test their rocket's abort system which enables the crew cabin to blast away from the rest of the rocket while it's on the pad. They will also test flight aerodynamics to ensure the rocket will be able to fly to its designed altitude as required by the X Prize.
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NASA announced two new missions today that will help scientists better understand the Earth's environment. The Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) Small Explorer will determine the causes of the Earth's highest altitude clouds, which sit right at the edge of space. The Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms mission (THEMIS), will fly five spacecraft in formation to help understand the colourful Northern and Southern lights. Both spacecraft are expected to launch in 2006.
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The privately funded X Prize received a helpful boost this week with a large investment from entrepreneurs Anousheh and Amir Ansari. The unspecified amount of money will be used to cover operation costs of the organization, including the insurance money that's backing the $10 million prize. The name of the prize has been changed to the Ansari X Prize, to recognize their contribution. 26 teams have registered to win the prize, which expires on January 1, 2005, if nobody can send their privately-built spacecraft into suborbital flight.
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New images obtained with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope show the immediate surroundings of the supermassive black hole at the heart of active galaxy NGC 1068. This central region of an active galaxy can outshine the rest of the galaxy because its black hole is consuming material; NGC 1068's monster black hole would have to be 100 million times the mass of our Sun to account for the amount of radiation pouring out of it. These new images resolve down to only 3 light-years away from the black hole.
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NASA's Cassini spacecraft has delivered some early images of Saturn's moon Titan; a mysterious world obscured by thick clouds. Some surface features only seen from Earth-based telescopes are now visible to Cassini. The spacecraft used its narrow angle camera's spectral filters, which are designed to penetrate the thick atmosphere to create the images. Cassini's first good opportunity to see Titan will be when the spacecraft enters orbit around Saturn in July; it'll fly past the moon at a distance of only 350,000 km.
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Just a little more than a year ago, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry thus bringing the second calamity to the shuttle fleet. A lot has been written regarding this event and, of course, the CAIB has completed its review of what happened, but the personal touch brought forward by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood in Comm check... The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia is a worthwhile addition. Their chronological narrative takes the reader on a sad and inciteful journey of the hopes, dreams and hard reality that make up a space mission.
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When scientists announced that they had found evidence of past life in a meteorite from Mars in 1996, it set off a controversy that has been going back and forth even now. The latest research, published in the journal American Mineralogist casts doubt that it's life that was in the space rock. The original discoverers believed that magnetite in the rock was formed by bacteria, but this new paper shows that it can also be caused by an inorganic process, which can be duplicated in the laboratory when iron-bearing carbonates decompose under high heat (such as atmospheric reentry).
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NASA released a 180-degree view of Endurance Crater this week, a target Opportunity has been rolling towards for many days. After taking in the view, Opportunity will try a few spots around the rim of the 130-metre crater to see if it can drive down without rolling over - hopefully it'll be able to get back out again. Portions of the crater's sides appear almost paved with smooth rocks, while in other areas it has steep walls with exposed rock, similar to the crater Opportunity landed in. It should be a treasure trove of scientific data.
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When you look at the sky, it's like looking through a time machine. The further you look, the longer the light took to reach our eyes. The most powerful telescopes on Earth can see out to a distance of 13 billion light-years away; but any more distant, and the first stars hadn't ignited yet to illuminate the sky - a time called the "Dark Era". The afterglow of the Big Bang, the cosmic background radiation, is present across the entire night sky, and astronomers have figured out how to spot the shadows cast by intervening particles to begin understanding the distribution of matter in the Dark Era.
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Scientists have gathered the first data from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, which is located 750 metres underground in an old iron mine in Soudan, Minnesota. They're looking for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS); particles that can pass right through the Earth almost unaffected, but which interact through gravity. The experiment isn't conclusive, but the scientists were able to put some boundaries on the mass and number of interactions the particles should make as they pass through the instrument's detectors. Over the next few years, they will increase the sensitivity of their equipment to resolve interactions by a factor of 20.
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Sea Launch successfully lofted the DIRECTV 7S broadcast satellite into orbit today. A Zenit-3SL rocket lifted off from the floating platform at 1242 GMT (8:42 am EDT), and sent the satellite into a geosynchronous orbit towards its final destination above 119 degrees West Longitude. The DIRECTV 7S is the heaviest commercial satellite ever launched, weighing in at 5,483 kg. This was the 10th successful consecutive mission for Sea Launch.
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Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have come up with a new theory to help explain how giant radio galaxies could create cosmic rays; through a process called magnetic field reconnection. According to this theory, the magnetic field lines of the supermassive black holes at the heart of these galaxies connect and vanish, converting the energy of the field into a spray of particles. Cosmic rays are a mystery to astronomers because they have so much energy, there doesn't seem to be anything in the Universe that could propel them.
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A journalist is an essential element in any responsible government. These people evaluate programs and activities the way food blenders process food. Tom Siegfried is a journalist but his target is not the government; it's physics and cosmology. He is gentler than a food processor and in Strange Matters, Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time he examines current and historical programs and activities, but of a scientific nature. He provides, like any good journalist, enough information to allow a reader to develop their own opinion, but not so much so as to preclude any choices.
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Researchers from the University of Chicago are about to run the most complex simulation of a supernova ever attempted. The simulation will use 2.7 million hours of supercomputing time from the U.S. Department of Energy; computers which are used to simulate nuclear weapon explosions. Scientists think that a supernova explodes inside the core of a white dwarf star, and then expands towards the surface like an inflating balloon, but the exact stages are still unknown. The results from the simulation should be ready by summer.
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The Sea Launch Odyssey launch platform and Commander ship arrived at the equator on Thursday to make preparations to launch the DIRECTV 7S satellite. If all goes well, a Zenit-3SL rocket will lift off from Odyssey on Tuesday, May 4, carrying the 5,483 kg satellite into a geosynchronous orbit. The DIRECTV 7S satellite will provide communication and broadcast services from its position at 119-degrees West longitude.
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Researchers located a binary system in 2003, believed to be a spinning pulsar and a neutron star. But new evidence indicates that it's actually two pulsars orbiting each other; the first known example of a binary pulsar system. Pulsars fire out a concentrated beam of radio radiation like a lighthouse - when this beam falls on the Earth, the pulsar looks brighter. In this system, one pulsar's beam is illuminating the other pulsar, so it allows astronomers to accurately measure the interactions between the objects.
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Here's a 1024x768 desktop wallpaper of The Bug Nebula (a.k.a. NGC 6302) taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It's one of the brightest and most extreme planetary nebulae ever discovered. At the heart of the nebula is one of the hottest stars known in the Universe; yet it's surrounded by a blanket of icy material. It's believed that the material from the nebula was expelled 10,000 years ago, but won't last long before it evaporates under the heat of the parent star.
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Sometimes it takes a prize to really propel an industry forward, like with the historic Orteig Prize, which rewarded Charles Lindbergh $25,000 for crossing the Atlantic by airplane. In its most recent budget, NASA has set aside some budget to reward groups who accomplish certain milestones. The agency will be holding a workshop on June 15-16 in Washington D.C. to gather ideas and brainstorm on what kinds of goals will leverage this budget the furthest.
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The team responsible for the MARSIS radar instrument on Mars Express has advised the ESA to put off the deployment of its radar booms. Currently, the booms are folded up like accordions against the side of the spacecraft, and they're designed to spring into 20-metre hollow cylinders. New and improved computer simulations show that they could swing more wildly when deployed than originally predicted, and potentially damage parts of the spacecraft. MARSIS will study the sub-surface of Mars to a depth of a few kilometres, and should reveal underground reservoirs of water or ice.
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This latest true colour image of Saturn taken by Cassini completely fills the field of view of the spacecraft's narrow angle camera. The photo was taken on March 27, when the spacecraft was 47.7 million kilometres away from the Ringed Planet. Subtle colour variations are visible across the planet, from the atmospheric bands to the rings. Cassini will reach the planet in July 2004.
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The newest photo released by the European Southern Observatory shows an enormous collision on a galactic scale. Two galaxies, NGC 6769 on the right, and NGC 6770 on the left are locked in orbit around each other, and exchanging stars and dust. Although this is destructive to both galaxies, the bluish tint to the spiral arms indicates massive amounts of star formation in fertile galactic nurseries.
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NASA's Spirit Rover took some new panoramic images of the "Columbia Hills", still a distant 2 kilometres, and 52 days away. Once Spirit reaches the base of the hills, operators will have the rover analyze the composition of the terrain and then decide whether to have Spirit actually climb one of the mountains and look for exposed outcroppings of rock. These areas would offer scientists a series of windows into the processes that shaped the formation of this part of Mars.
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NASA has checked out its recently launched Gravity Probe B spacecraft, and everything seems to be working fine. The solar panels are producing enough power to run all of its electrical systems, and its communications systems are talking to operators on the ground. All four gyro suspension systems have been activated, and the gyros are now being prepared to gather scientific data. If all goes well, the spacecraft should confirm two predictions that Einstein made about general relativity: how the Earth bends space and time around it, and how it drags space and time as it rotates.
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New observations show that Arctic sea ice isn't completely static; it undergoes back and forth motions twice a day, no matter how cold the weather gets. Researchers used Canada's RADARSAT Earth observation satellite to image the Arctic region up to five times a day. It found that the ice moved back and forth during a 12-hour cycle, caused by the Earth's rotation. This movement could create increased ice formation as the icepack thins, and prevent depletion of the icecaps.
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Four planets are gathering in the night time sky, and the view is spectacular. On the evening of April 22, look to the West just after it's starting to get dark; you'll see Venus blazing away just above a delicate crescent Moon. Mars is just above Venus, and Saturn is still higher. If you turn to the East, the brightest object in that direction is Jupiter. On Friday, the Moon will instead be beside Mars, and then beside Saturn on Saturday. To really enjoy the experience, get your hands on a telescope and see these incredible objects up close with your own eyes.
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The giant Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico - already the largest and most sensitive single dish in the world - is getting an upgrade, which should make it even more powerful. In the past, Arecibo had the ability to look at one spot in the sky at a time, and so it took many observations to build up a comprehensive image. The newly attached ALFA (Arecibo L-Band Feed Array) works like a camera to let the observatory look at seven times the area in the same amount of time. This should dramatically speed up Arecibo's ability to gather data, and let it search for rarer objects, like pulsars orbiting black holes.
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The latest image of Saturn released from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows the Ringed Planet in four wavelengths: ultraviolet, visible blue, far red, and near infrared. The images were taken over the course of 20 minutes, and each one reveals a different aspect of Saturn's cloud cover and rings; probing the planet's atmosphere at different depths. When this photo was taken, Cassini was 44.5 million kilometres from Saturn and closing. It will reach the planet in July.
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We do live. We age. We move. Time is how we refer to the transfer of ourselves from our beginning to end. Space is how we scale things through our primary sense of vision. Using the scientific method we can define iota that are so incredibly abstract as to be partly in our universe and partly somewhere else. We are also pretty sure that as we have a beginning and end so does the universe in which we live. Much of the basis from which we draw this understanding is directly attributable to Albert Einstein. In Michio Kaku's book, Einstein's Cosmos, How Albert Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time we are taken on a wonderful brief journey through Einstein's life and the development of his theories that establish this basis.
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To celebrate the 14th anniversary of its launch, the operators of the Hubble Space Telescope have released this image of a ring of star clusters wrapped around the core of a spiral galaxy - and I've turned it into a 1024x768 desktop wallpaper. The galaxy is called AM 0644-741, and it's located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Dorado. The galaxy's unusual shape was caused by a collision between two galaxies, which threw out stars and dust like ripples in a pond. The shockwaves heated up this material, which began an intense period of star formation.
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