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| Image credit: NASA |
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| Genesis Capsule Crashes |
| Sep 8, 2004 - Helicopters were waiting in Utah to gently catch a capsule from the Genesis probe carrying precious samples of the Sun's solar wind, but the safe recovery didn't happen. It appears that the capsule's parachute failed to open as it entered the Earth atmosphere, and it crashed into the ground at 161 km/h (100 mph). It could take some time to recover the capsule because the charges designed to open the parachute might still be live, and could still explode. The $264 million mission was launched in 2001, and carried delicate wafers of pure silicon, gold, sapphire, and diamond designed to gently catch solar wind particles. It's unknown how much of the experiment can be recovered at this point. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA |
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| Cleaning Up Kennedy Space Center After Frances |
| Sep 8, 2004 - NASA workers are continuing to assess the damage that Hurricane Frances wreaked on the Kennedy Space Center when it tore through Cape Canaveral over the weekend. Many buildings suffered wind and rain damage, including the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the space shuttles are attached to the external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters - it had 820 panels blown off. The Thermal Protection System Facility, where heat tiles and blankets are manufactured suffered significant damage. It's still unknown if the effects of the hurricane will push back the shuttle's return to flight. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: Chandra |
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| Dark Matter is Tugging at a Galactic Cluster |
| Sep 8, 2004 - Astronomers theorize that most of the mass in the Universe is dark matter; it's invisible and detectable only by the pull of its gravity on objects. This dark matter is in long filaments, and galaxy clusters form where these filaments intersect. NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory has found a hot gas cloud hundreds of thousands of light-years across in the the Fornax galaxy cluster is collapsing towards an invisible centre of gravity. Computer simulations have accurately predicted this kind of interaction between galaxy clusters and filaments of dark matter, so this discovery will give astronomers a chance to understand the process better. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA/JPL |
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| Colliding Galaxies Awash With Star Formation |
| Sep 8, 2004 - NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has taken this image of two galaxies colliding, creating destruction and a wave of new star formation. The image of the Antennae galaxies in infrared shows how they're churning into each other, and throwing off massive streamers of stars and clouds of dust. Spitzer can "see" through the dark dust, and has found large nurseries of young stars in the center of the galaxies, where they overlap. This cloud of buried stars appears red in this image, and the blue indicates older stars which can be seen in visible light. (Full Story) |
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