May 19, 2010
A new infrared image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, showcases the Tadpole nebula, a star-forming hub in the Auriga constellation about 12,000 light-years from Earth. As WISE scanned the sky, capturing this mosaic of stitched-together frames, it happened to catch an asteroid in our solar system [...]
October 7, 2009
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn — by far the largest of the giant planet’s many rings.
The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million [...]
October 4, 2009
A team of University of Hawai’i at Mānoa researchers led by Ralf Kaiser, physical chemist at UH Mānoa, unraveled the chemical evolution of the orange-brownish colored atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, the only solar system body besides Venus and Earth with a solid surface and thick atmosphere. The UH Mānoa team, including Xibin [...]
September 30, 2009
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is starting to come together. A major component of the telescope, the Integrated Science Instrument Module structure, recently arrived at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. for testing in the Spacecraft Systems Development and Integration Facility.
The Integrated Science Instrument Module, or ISIM, is an important component [...]
September 30, 2009
A newly released set of images, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope before the recent Servicing Mission, highlight the ongoing drama in two galaxies in the Virgo Cluster affected by a process known as “ram pressure stripping”, which can result in peculiar-looking galaxies.
An extremely hot X-ray emitting gas known as the intra-cluster [...]
September 29, 2009
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is testing a new robotic lunar lander test bed that will aid in the development of a new generation of multi-use landers for future robotic space exploration.
The test article is equipped with thrusters which function to guide the lander via closed- loop, autonomous flight algorithms.
One set of [...]
September 28, 2009
On certain nights, an arresting green line pierces the sky above NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It’s a laser directed at the moon, visible when the air is humid. No, NASA is not repelling an invasion. Instead, it’s tracking its own spacecraft.
28 times per second, engineers at NASA Goddard fire [...]
September 28, 2009
NASA’s Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging spacecraft known as MESSENGER will fly by Mercury for the third and final time on Sept. 29. The spacecraft will pass less than 142 miles above the planet’s rocky surface for a final gravity assist that will enable it to enter Mercury’s orbit in 2011.
Determining [...]
September 25, 2009
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed frozen water hiding just below the surface of mid-latitude Mars. The spacecraft’s observations were obtained from orbit after meteorites excavated fresh craters on the Red Planet.
Scientists controlling instruments on the orbiter found bright ice exposed at five Martian sites with new craters that range in depth from [...]
September 25, 2009
Astronomers using the twin 10-meter telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii have explored one of the most compact dust disks ever resolved around another star. If placed in our own solar system, the disk would span about four times Earth’s distance from the sun, reaching nearly to Jupiter’s orbit. The [...]
|
|
