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.
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