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| Image credit: NASA/JPL |
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| Genesis Heads for Home |
| Aug 12, 2004 - NASA's Genesis spacecraft made an important flight correction maneuver on Monday, which put it on course to return to the Earth after more than three years in space. Genesis has spent this time collecting particles of the solar wind on ultra pure wafers of gold, sapphire, silicon and diamond. On September 8, it will send a sample return capsule into the Earth's atmosphere, which will be caught by specially trained helicopter pilots. The particles will then be analyzed by scientists in laboratories around the Earth. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: Hubble |
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| Hubble Sees a Gas Cavity in Space |
| Aug 12, 2004 - The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed an unusual situation where a young, hot star is carving out a cavity in a region of space that was once filled with cold, dense material. The massive star is known as N44F, and its stellar wind is moving nearly 5 times as fast as our Sun's solar wind. It's also ejecting 100 million times more material than the Sun. The fast moving torrent of particles collides with the colder surrounding material, pushes it away, and heats it up. N44F is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, located 130,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the southern constellation Dorado. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: Hubble |
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| Wallpaper: Little Ghost Nebula |
| Aug 12, 2004 - Okay, new background. This time you'll be switching your computer desktop to show the Little Ghost Nebula - known to astronomers as NGC 6369 - taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. In the eyepiece of a small telescope, this planetary nebula looks like a ghostly ring surrounding a faint dying star. At some point thousands of years ago, the central star expanded in size to become a red giant star, and then expelled its outer layers. The blue-green ring is the expelled material, which now reaches a light-year in size. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: ESA |
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| How the Solar Wind Gets Past the Earth's Shield |
| Aug 12, 2004 - The European Space Agency's Cluster spacecraft have helped answer a 17-year mystery about how the magnetosphere, a magnetic bubble that surrounds the Earth, keeps filling up with electrified gases, when it should be acting as a barrier to keep them out. The four Cluster spacecraft found huge swirling vortices of gas at the outer edges of the magnetosphere caused by interacting flows of solar wind. As they collapse, they force material into the magnetosphere, filling it up. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI |
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| Cassini's View of Tiny Hyperion |
| Aug 12, 2004 - This is the best picture that Cassini's taken so far of Hyperion, one of Saturn's smaller moons (266 kilometers, 165 miles across ). The picture was taken on July 15, when Cassini was about 6.7 million km (4.1 million miles) away. Hyperion has an irregular shape, and it's known to tumble erratically as it orbits around Saturn. Cassini will get a much closer view when it does a flyby on September 26, 2005. (Full Story) |
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