Top 10 must-see list for new astronomers
It is very difficult to draw up a Top 10 list in any subject. In astronomy it is even more difficult due the the huge number of prospective candidates for the list. I have made it somewhat easier by restricting the list to things that beginners may view with relatively basic equipment. My list is …
Fiery end for ESA’s ATV Albert Einstein
ESA’s fourth Automated Transfer Vehicle cargo ferry, Albert Einstein, completed its five-month mission to the International Space Station by reentering the atmosphere today and burning up safely over an uninhabited area of the southern Pacific Ocean. Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs) are the most complex space vehicles ever developed in Europe and are the largest and …
How fast can Juno go?
When arriving at Jupiter, the planet’s gravity pulls in Juno faster and faster until the spacecraft reaches a speed of over 250,000 kilometers per hour (150,000 miles per hour) with respect to Earth – making it one of the fastest human-made objects ever. When it arrives at Jupiter, it slams on the brakes, firing its main engine in …
Juno’s flyby portrait of Earth
This false color composite shows more than half of Earth’s disk over the coast of Argentina, South America and the South Atlantic Ocean as NASA’s Juno probe slingshotted by on Oct. 9, 2013 for a gravity assisted acceleration to Jupiter. The mosaic was assembled from raw images taken by the Junocam imager. Juno will arrive …
United Launch Alliance celebrates 75th successful launch
An Atlas V rocket carrying the Advanced Extremely High Frequency-3 (AEHF-3) satellite for the United States Air Force lifted off from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida early in the morning of Sept. 18. It was United Launch Alliance’s ninth launch of an ambitious 12 mission schedule for the year. …
Cassini images Earth beneath Saturn’s rings
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured color images of Earth and the moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) away on July 19. Meanwhile, MESSENGER, the first probe to orbit Mercury, took a black-and-white image from a distance of 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) as part of a …
LADEE on mission to study Moon’s thin atmosphere
Did you know the Moon has an atmosphere? I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t. Until just a few years ago nobody did. It’s not much. You can’t breathe it. We think it’s mostly dust. But we don’t know exactly what’s in it or how it works. How does an atmosphere operate when the days are 28 …
Into the unknown! Interstellar adventure begins for Voyager 1
The hotly contested question has been answered: Voyager 1 is humanity’s first object to enter interstellar space! The historic announcement came from NASA after a year of review into 2012 and 2013 data points from the intrepid probe. Officially, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space on 25 August 2012. The debate For over a year, scientists …
Radio bursts discovered from beyond our galaxy
Astronomers, including a team member from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., have detected the first population of radio bursts known to originate from galaxies beyond our own Milky Way. The sources of the light bursts are unknown, but cataclysmic events, such as merging or exploding stars, are likely the triggers. A radio burst …
Lockheed Martin supplying advanced GPS, secure communication satellites
One half of the formula was Glenn L. Martin. Motivated by flight legend Orville Wright to bring his groundbreaking idea for a new aircraft design to life, he found a church and used it as a garage to build his creation. Destiny started brewing four months later, when brothers Allan and Malcolm Lockheed created Alco-Hydro …
What would we want to know if we landed on Jupiter’s Europa?
Most of what scientists know of Jupiter’s moon Europa they have gleaned from a dozen or so close flybys from NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1979 and NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the mid-to-late 1990s. Even in these fleeting, paparazzi-like encounters, scientists have seen a fractured, ice-covered world with tantalizing signs of a liquid water ocean …
Being a cosmonaut was ‘just a job’ for history-making Helen Sharman
The following article is an account of several meetings, chats and short interviews I have had with the first Briton in space, Helen P. Sharman I first met Helen over 15 years ago at the University of Sheffield when I attended a lecture organised by the University of Sheffield’s Chemistry Society at which she told …
Cold brown dwarfs blur line between stars and planets
In 2011, astronomers on the hunt for the coldest star-like celestial bodies discovered a new class of such objects using NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope. But until now, no one knew exactly how cool the bodies’ surfaces really are. In fact, some evidence suggested they could be at room temperature. A new …
Antares delivers Cygnus to ISS
The new ‘Commercial Space Era’ received a resounding boost today when a privately developed Antares rocket lofting the first ever Cygnus commercial cargo resupply craft thundered to space from America’s newest launch pad at NASA Wallops along the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The history making launch marks the first time that a spacecraft launched from …
Actor Seth Green has his eye on space
Despite being one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood, Seth Green still finds time to stay current on NASA missions and dreams of going into space one day. With three TV shows currently on the air – Dads, Robot Chicken and Family Guy – he’s only a few clicks of a remote away from …
WISE finds mysterious centaurs may be comets
The true identity of centaurs, the small celestial bodies orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Neptune, is one of the enduring mysteries of astrophysics. Are they asteroids or comets? A new study of observations from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) finds most centaurs are comets. Until now, astronomers were not certain whether centaurs are …
Masten’s Xombie rocket tests new precision landing software
A year after NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity’s landed on Mars, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., are testing a sophisticated flight-control algorithm that could allow for even more precise, pinpoint landings of future Martian spacecraft. Flight testing of the new Fuel Optimal Large Divert Guidance (G-FOLD) algorithm for planetary pinpoint landing is being …
Starting in astronomy: Recognising the night sky
When you look up into the night skies you will see a myriad of twinkling stars. With all of the stars in the sky you would have thought it would be impossible to recognise individual ones, but you would be wrong. Of course, nobody can recognise all of them but by starting to see patterns …
Cygnus the swan
Cygnus, The Swan, is a majestic and easy to identify constellation in the northern hemisphere. This is best viewed in summer and autumn when it rises overhead in the night skies. Cygnus is a great naked eye constellation with lots of detail and great objects within it as you start to use more powerful optical …
Saturn’s monster storm surprises
A monster storm that erupted on Saturn in late 2010 – as large as any storm ever observed on the ringed planet – has already impressed researchers with its intensity and long-lived turbulence. A new paper in the journal Icarus reveals another facet of the storm’s explosive power: its ability to churn up water ice from …