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March 7, 2006, 9:10 PM CT
The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera -- the largest telescopic camera ever sent to another planet -- is flying aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Before the camera begins operating, however, MRO must go into orbit around the red planet.
Heads of Agency meet at Kennedy Space Center
The partners look forward to the upcoming Space Shuttle flight
At today's meeting, the Heads of Agency were also briefed on the status of ongoing ISS operations and flight hardware development activities across the partnership. The partners reaffirmed their agencies' commitment to meet their mutual obligations, to implement six person crew operations in 2009, and an adequate number of Shuttle flights to complete the assembly of ISS by the end of the decade. The partners also affirmed their plans to use a combination of transportation systems provided by Europe, Japan, Russia, and the United States in order to complete ISS assembly in a timeframe that meets the needs of the partners and ensures full utilisation of the unique capabilities of the ISS throughout its lifetime. The ISS Heads of Agency expressed their appreciation for the outstanding work being conducted by the ISS on-orbit crews and ground support personnel, commending them for their creativity in making full use of available resources to operate the ISS, prepare for assembly missions and carry out scientific research aboard the ISS. The uninterrupted flow of Russian vehicles, the outstanding performance of Canadarm2, the successful Shuttle logistics flight, and the resourcefulness of all of the partners' ground-based engineers, researchers and operations personnel have served to highlight the strength of the ISS partnership and the importance of international cooperation in space operations......... Posted by: Brooke Permalink Source Interiors Of Giant Icy Moons
A research team has demonstrated a new kind of "creep" or flow in a high-pressure form of ice by creating in a laboratory the conditions of pressure, temperature, stress, and grain size that mimic those in the deep interiors of large icy moons. High-pressure phases of ice are major components of the giant icy moons of the outer solar system: Jupiter's Ganymede and Callisto, Saturn's Titan, and Neptune's Triton. Triton is roughly the size of our own moon; the other three giants are about 1.5 times larger in diameter. Accepted theory says that most of the icy moons condensed as "dirty snow balls" from the dust cloud around the sun (the solar nebula) about 4.5 billion years ago. The moons were warmed internally by this accretionary process and by radioactive decay of their rocky fraction. The convective flow (much like the swirls in a hot cup of coffee) of ice in the interiors of the icy moons controlled their subsequent evolution and present-day structure. The weaker the ice, the more efficient the convection, and the cooler the interiors. Conversely, the stronger the ice, the warmer the interiors and the greater the possibility of something like a liquid internal ocean appearing......... Posted by: Brooke Permalink March 2, 2006, 10:39 PM CT Project SERPO  Project SERPO was a suspected exchange program between astronaut-trained American military personnel and alien visitors from the Zeta Reticuli star system. The project was reported to have taken place in the 1960s and 70s. An extraterrestrial craft that crashed in 1947 in New Mexico influenced the U.S. military to make contact with the visitors. Supposedly, 12 specially-trained U.S. military personnel were sent to the aliens' home planet for a 10 year stay; they returned in the 1970s. A website called Serpo.org is claiming that inside reports from the Americans involved in the program have become public. No sources related with the military have confirmed this. This has got to be a hoax. Source March 2, 2006, 10:16 PM CT What's Inside a Gas Giant?
Source Largest Ever Hubble Galaxy Portrait
Giant galaxies weren't assembled in a day. Neither was this Hubble Space Telescope image of the face-on spiral galaxy Messier 101 (the Pinwheel Galaxy). It is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy beyond the Milky Way that has ever been publicly released from Hubble. The galaxy's portrait is actually composed from 51 individual Hubble exposures, in addition to elements from images from ground-based photos. The final composite image measures a whopping 16,000 by 12,000 pixels. The Hubble observations that went into assembling this image composite were retrieved from the Hubble archive and were originally acquired for a range of Hubble projects: determining the expansion rate of the universe; studying the formation of star clusters in giant starbirth regions; finding the stars responsible for intense X-ray emission and discovering blue supergiant stars. As an example of the a number of treasures hiding in this immense image, a group led by K.D. Kuntz (Johns Hopkins University and NASA) recently catalogued nearly 3000 previously undetected star clusters in it......... Posted by: Brooke Permalink Source Deep X-ray Surveys Reveal Black Hole Population
"We wanted a census of all the black holes and we wanted to know what they are like," says Dr. Niel Brandt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics. "We also wanted to measure how black holes have grown over the history of the Universe". Brandt and other scientists have done just that by looking at a patch of sky in the Northern hemisphere called the Chandra Deep Field-North, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and a similar patch in the Southern hemisphere called the Extended Chandra Deep Field-South. Surveys are also being carried out in other parts of the sky using both Chandra and the European Space Agency's X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission-Newton. The scientists looked at X-ray emissions because areas around black holes emit X-rays as well as visible light. The penetrating nature of X-rays provides a direct way to identify the black holes. Using X-rays also enables astronomers to pinpoint the black holes at the centers of galaxies without their signal being washed out by the visible light coming from a galaxy's stars, Brandt told attendees at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis, Mo. , February 17. The black holes they studied were those that reside at the centers of galaxies and are actively emitting X-rays, therefore they are called active galactic nuclei......... Posted by: Brooke Permalink Source Cosmic Battle Creates Huge Tunnel
image show the disturbed hot multi-million degree gas in Abell 2597
Using the Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the multi-million degree gas in the galaxy cluster Abell 2597, the researchers discovered an unusual X-ray tunnel large enough to fit the entire Milky Way galaxy inside. The cluster, located at a distance of roughly one billion light years, contains a tunnel in the hot gas, which measures nearly 110 thousand light years by 36 thousand light years in size. The tunnel, which appears to originate near the core of the central giant galaxy in the cluster, may be more than 200 million years old......... Posted by: Brooke Permalink A White Dwarf Explodes
The stars in the binary system are much too small to be visible, but spectropolarimetry reveals that ejecta from an exploding white dwarf in SN 2002ic (dark red) is interacting with surrounding matter from a companion star, distributed primarily in the disk (dark blue)
Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, the scientists determined that supernova 2002ic exploded inside a flat, dense, clumpy disk of dust and gas, previously blown away from a companion star. Their work suggests that this and some other precursors of Type Ia supernovae resemble the objects known as protoplanetary nebulae, well known in our own Milky Way galaxy. Supernovae are labeled as per the elements visible in their spectra: Type I spectra lack hydrogen lines, while Type II spectra have these lines. What makes SN 2002ic unusual is that its spectrum otherwise resembles a typical Type Ia supernova but exhibits a strong hydrogen emission line. Type II and some other supernovae occur when the cores of very massive stars collapse and explode, leaving behind extremely dense neutron stars or even black holes. Type Ia supernovae, however, explode by a very different mechanism. "A Type Ia supernova is a metallic fireball," explains Berkeley Lab's Wang, a pioneer in the field of supernova spectropolarimetry. "A Type Ia has no hydrogen or helium but lots of iron, plus radioactive nickel, cobalt, and titanium, a little silicon, and a bit of carbon and oxygen. So one of its progenitors must be an old star that has evolved to leave behind a carbon-oxygen white dwarf. But carbon and oxygen, as nuclear fuels, do not burn easily. How can a white dwarf explode?"......... Posted by: Brooke Permalink |
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The most powerful camera ever to orbit Mars will relay its first images of the planet to scientists at Tucson's University of Arizona in about two weeks.
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