How to search for alien seas

The search for habitable planets around other stars has taken a step forward by, ironically, looking at our own planet. To test whether we would be able to detect oceans on exoplanets, researchers used the Deep Impact spacecraft to observe Earth, as if we were aliens looking at Earth with the tools we might have in ten years.

The Deep Impact spacecraft hit the headlines in July 2005 when it fired a copper projectile into the comet 9P/Tempel 1, creating a huge outburst on the comet’s icy surface. Since it still has fuel and power, astronomers have since been employing it in other jobs. For instance, at the beginning of this year it began using its cameras to search several stars for the telltale dips in light that indicate transiting planets.

On the edge of a hungry black hole

Gas and dust equal to the mass of two Earths are being gobbled up every hour by a hungry black hole in a distant galaxy, according to a space telescope probing the Universe in X-rays that has peered closer to a black hole than ever before.

The European Space Agency’s orbiting XMM-Newton observatory studied the black hole in the core of an active galaxy known only as 1H0707-495. This particular galaxy is described as Seyfert 1 galaxy, which typically have bright centres emitting a broad range of hydrogen emission but narrow emission lines of heavier elements such as iron. Four out of five Seyfert galaxies are barred spirals. The bars funnel large amounts of gas into the core, which then feeds into a spiralling disc around the supermassive black hole located in the centre of the galaxy.

As the gas spins around the black hole, it heats up, producing X-rays that then illuminate clumps of matter in the disc. To get a better grasp of the size and distribution of material in this disc, astronomers used XMM-Newton to search for X-rays emitted by iron atoms. They chose iron because it has a distinctive signature that is affected by the spin of the black hole, the velocity at which the iron atoms are orbiting around the black hole, and the energy required to escape the black hole’s gravity. As such, they can tell us a lot about the characteristics of the black hole.

Did life need asteroid bombardment?

A period 3.9 billion years ago when Earth was peppered with impacts by large asteroids may have created an environment in which primitive life could take hold, rather than destroying that life. This is the bold new claim by astrobiologists at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA.

What we know today as the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) hit all the inner planets around 700 million years after the Solar System formed. The Moon and Mercury still bear the scars from this frightful time when fire and rock rained down from the heavens on a regular basis. Nobody is sure what caused the LHB, but the outward migration of the giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn may have been enough to disturb the orbits of various comets and asteroids, slinging them in our direction.

Victoria provides Opportunity to view Mars' geological history

Opportunity’s two-year stay in Mars’ Victoria Crater is now bearing fruit, with the publication of the first major analysis of what the Mars Exploration Rover found.

Details describe a crater carved by wind and water erosion, and a strong indication that the water was mostly underground rather than running freely on the surface. The water appears to have come and gone several times billions of years ago, with the wind continuing the erosion until the present day.

Atlantis landing in California

Crew returns from breathing new life into Hubble

Delayed two days by stormy Florida weather, the shuttle Atlantis glided to a California landing today, closing out a successful mission to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope with a picture-perfect Mojave Desert touchdown.

Former astronaut Charles Bolden picked to lead NASA

Nineteen years after helping launch the Hubble Space Telescope, Charles F. Bolden Jr., a former combat pilot, Marine Corps major general and veteran space shuttle commander, has been selected by the Obama administration to serve as the space agency's next administrator. Lori Garver, a former NASA associate administrator for policy and plans and a space policy advisor to the Obama campaign, will serve as Bolden's deputy.

These talented individuals will help put NASA on course to boldly push the boundaries of science, aeronautics and exploration in the 21st century and ensure the long-term vibrancy of America's space program," Obama said in a statement Saturday.

President Obama hails successful Hubble repair

President Barack Obama called the crew of the shuttle Atlantis late Wednesday and congratulated the astronauts on the successful overhaul of the Hubble Space Telescope. He also promised to name a new NASA administrator soon, although he provided no clues as to who might get the nod.

Astronauts test re-entry systems for Friday landing

The Atlantis astronauts tested the shuttle's re-entry systems early Thursday and began packing for landing Friday, weather permitting, to close out a successful mission to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope. The flight plan calls for a de-orbit rocket firing at 8:49:16 a.m. Friday, setting up a landing on runway 15 at the Kennedy Space Center at 10:00:31 a.m. A second landing opportunity is available one orbit later, at 11:39:18 a.m.

With no major technical problems in orbit, the only question mark is the weather, with forecasters predicting a broken cloud deck at 4,000 feet, crosswinds above 15 knots and a chance of thundershowers within 30 nautical miles of the runway, all violations of NASA's landing weather flight rules.

High winds and torrential rains rumbled through the area overnight as severe thunderstorms lashed Florida's Space Coast. There is a 50 percent chance of heavy rain, high winds and thundershowers all day Thursday and more of the same expected overnight and Friday.

But the astronauts have conserved power and now have saved enough hydrogen and oxygen to power the ship's electricity producing fuel cells through Monday. As a result, NASA is not staffing backup landing sites Friday. If the weather or some other issue blocks the two available landing opportunities, the crew will stay in orbit an extra day and try again Saturday.

Spirit struggles with soft soil

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is facing one of its biggest challenges yet with a patch of soft soil that is currently holding the rover hostage.

During recent attempts to drive around the Home Plate area of Mars, Spirit’s wheels have sunk about halfway into the ground. Concerns have been raised that Spirit may sink so low that its body may make contact with rocks on the surface, making the escape from this situation even more of a challenge. Engineers and scientists have temporarily suspended all driving while they simulate driving options with a test rover back on Earth.

Behavioral problems that Spirit exhibited in early April – episodes of amnesia, computer resets and failure to wake for communications sessions – have not recurred in the past three weeks, though investigations have yet to diagnose the root causes.

Comet crystals feel the heat

Since comets formed out in the cold depths of the Solar System, the existence of materials in them that must have been created in high temperatures has been a real puzzle, until now. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has observed the infrared signature of tiny silicate crystals, of the type found in comets, being created in the planet-forming disc around a young star called EX Lupi, in the constellation of Lupus.

The stellar outbursts occur when the growing young star accumulates a large amount of mass from the dusty, gaseous disc that is spinning around it. Each outburst sends a flash of heat permeating through the disc. At the distance the crystals were seen at, the temperature reached 725 degrees Celsius (about 1,000 kelvin), enough to thermally ‘anneal’ the silicate dust.

Exotic dust in comet trail

Comet dust caught in the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere and scooped up by a NASA aircraft had been found to contain grains of dust dating back to before our Solar System formed. Dust like this is worth its weight in gold for telling us about the original conditions in the solar nebula that formed the planets.

The dust is from comet 26P/Grigg-Skjellerup, which last passed through the inner Solar System in 2002. A year later, Earth itself passed through the trail of the comet, and the NASA aircraft climbed to catch the dust. It was then handed over to a consortium of UK, US and German astronomers who found various chemical treasure troves, including in one dust particle four grains of silicate material that date back to before the formation of the Sun.

Proton rocket launches TV broadcaster for Asia

A Russian Proton rocket lifted off from Kazakhstan early Saturday with a satellite that will broadcast television programming directly into homes across Indonesia and India.

The Proton jettisoned its first stage two minutes later, leaving the second stage to burn for nearly three-and-a-half minutes. The launcher's third stage took over five-and-a-half minutes into the flight for a firing of more than four minutes, during which the rocket let go of its payload fairing that protected the ProtoStar 2 satellite as it flew through the lower atmosphere.

The spacecraft will be positioned in a slot at 107.7 degrees east longitude in the geosynchronous belt, allowing it to reach customers in Indonesia, India, the Philippines and Taiwan.

Ariane 5 rocket launches double science payload

An Ariane 5 launcher rocketed through blue skies and into space on 14.5.09 with two European telescopes designed to give scientists unprecedented views of star birth and the relic light from the Big Bang.

The bullet-shaped rocket, powered by a hydrogen-burning main engine and twin solid rocket boosters, lifted off at 1312 GMT (9:12 a.m. EDT) from the European-run spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

Herschel and Planck are on their way

The European Space Agency’s Herschel and Planck spacecraft have successfully launched atop an Ariane 5 rocket from the spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana. The launch took place at 2:12pm on 14.05.09 afternoon.

Shuttle Atlantis blasting from NASA

When the space shuttle Atlantis blasts off on NASA's final mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, the shuttle Endeavour and a four-man crew will be standing by for launch on a mission space agency managers hope will never be needed: an emergency rescue flight to bring the Atlantis astronauts back to Earth if heat shield damage or some other problem prevents a safe re-entry.

The first underwater sim for the final Hubble EVA

The history of Hubble Space Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope has cost U.S. taxpayers some $10 billion in the quarter century since the project was approved. But to astronomers around the world, the high-flying satellite is, in a word, priceless.

The solar-powered spacecraft has helped astronomers confirm the existence of super massive black holes, pin down the true age of the universe and spot the faint building blocks of the first galaxies as they collided, merged and grew just a billion years or so after the birth of the cosmos.

Its mind-bending photographs have charted the life cycles of distant suns in unprecedented detail, providing unmatched views of the vast stellar nurseries where stars are born to the supernova bangs and whimpers marking old age and death.

It has catalogued myriad infant solar systems in the process of forming planets and provided flyby-class views of the outer planets in Earth's own solar system, routinely capturing phenomena as common as dust storms on Mars to once-in-a-lifetime events like the 1994 crash of a comet into the atmosphere of Jupiter.

Solar wind tans young asteroids

Unlike human skin which is damaged by prolonged exposure to sunlight over a lifetime, an asteroid's surface is aged in the first instances of its life.

Of course, the time scales of the exposure are much different: for an asteroid the damage is done over a period of one million years, but this is still a very short timeframe compared with the 4.6 billion year age of the Solar System itself.

New observations conducted using ESO's New Technology Telescope at La Silla and the Very Large Telescope at Paranal, astronomers have shed some light on this mystery. The astronomers looked at freshly exposed asteroid surfaces (caused by the collision of two asteroids) and noticed that they change colour in less than a million years.

The charged, fast moving particles in the solar wind damage the asteroid's surface at an amazing rate.The solar wind contains highly energetic particles that bombard the exposed surfaces of asteroids, eroding the molecules and crystals on the surface and rearranging them into different configurations with distinct colours and properties.

Herschel and Planck gear up for 14 May launch

ESA's two missions to probe the far reaches of the Universe are gearing up to launch from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana on 14 May.

The two satellites, Herschel and Planck, will share a ride aboard the same Ariane 5 rocket. Shortly after launch they will separate and follow different trajectories to the second Lagrangian point of our Solar System, 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.

Both missions’ instruments have completed their final checkouts, and the spacecrafts’ thruster tanks have been fueled.

Planck will be dedicated to answering fundamental questions about the origin and evolution of the Universe by peering back to just 400,000 years after the Big Bang gave birth to existence. It will spend at least 15 months mapping the cosmic microwave background, light from the primordial soup of particles that eventually evolved to become our modern-day Universe.

Fermi explores high energy “space invaders”

New details of high energy particles detected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope were revealed on 4th May, 2009 at the American Physical Society meeting held in Denver.

Since its launch last June Fermi has discovered a new class of pulsars, probed gamma-ray bursts and watched flaring jets in galaxies billions of light years away.

Delta 2 rocket launches from Vandenberg with missile defense research craft

The Delta 2 rocket carrying the engineering trailblazer for America's new Space Tracking and Surveillance System launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Liftoff occurred May 5 at 1:24 p.m. PDT.

Gamma-ray burst smashes cosmic distance record

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers have found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or less than five percent of its present age. The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen.

At 3:55 a.m. EDT on April 23, Swift detected a ten-second-long gamma-ray burst of modest brightness. It quickly pivoted to bring its ultraviolet/optical and X-ray telescopes to observe the burst location. Swift saw a fading X-ray afterglow but none in visible light.

Spirit rover resumes driving on the Red Planet

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit drove on Thursday for the first time since April 8, acting on commands from engineers who are still investigating bouts of amnesia and other unusual behavior exhibited by Spirit in the past two weeks.

The drive took Spirit about 1.7 meters (5.6 feet) toward destinations about 150 meters (about 500 feet) away. The rover has already operated more than 20 times longer than its original prime mission on Mars.

Three times in the past two weeks, Spirit has failed to record data from a day's activity period into non-volatile flash memory. That is a type of computer memory where information is preserved even when power is off, such as when the rover naps to conserve power.

The team is also investigating two other types of problems Spirit has experienced recently: failing to wake up for three consecutive communication sessions about two weeks ago and rebooting its computer on April 11, 12 and 18. Engineers have not found any causal links among these three types of events.

Russian lunar and Mars missions face delays

The planned revival by Russia of its once mighty lunar and planetary robotic exploration program is beginning to falter due to Russian budget and spacecraft problems.

The difficulties are threatening to delay Russia's first mission to the Moon in 33 years. A Russian roundtrip mission to the Martian moon Phobos is also in trouble.

Graveyards of solar systems around dead suns

Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to study white dwarf stars, astronomers have found the dusty remains of ancient solar systems.

White dwarfs are the dense glowing embers of Sunlike stars. While their atmospheres should consist entirely of hydrogen and helium, they are sometimes contaminated with heavier elements like calcium and magnesium.These metals really shouldn't be there.That means they are external pollutants.

The rocky debris imaged by Spitzer probably represents the innermost planets of a solar system that were ripped apart by the gravitational forces of their host star at the end of its life. Extrapolating our own Sun's life into the white dwarf phase, simulations show that the Earth may not survive, but that Mars and asteroid belt would probably lie outside of the Sun's grasp.

Perhaps the most exciting and important aspect of this research is that the composition of these crushed asteroids can be measured using the heavy elements seen in the white dwarf. In one case 17 heavy elements were found in one star, yielding a composition that closely matches the equivalent of a combined Earth and Moon. The next step will be to search for those ingredients that may suggest that life-bearing planets may once have existed in these systems.