Nancy Atkinson, Author at Universe Today

October 3, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Did Our Solar System Start With a “Little Bang?”

Artist illustration of supernova. Credit: NASA

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What prompted the formation of our little corner of the universe – our sun and planetary system? For several decades, scientists have thought that the Solar System formed as a result of a shock wave from an exploding star—a supernova—that triggered the collapse of a dense, dusty gas cloud, which then contracted to form the Sun and the planets. But detailed models of this formation process have only worked under the simplifying assumption that the temperatures during the violent events remained constant. That, of course, is very unlikely. But now, astrophysicists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) have shown for the first time that a supernova could indeed have triggered the Solar System’s formation under the more likely conditions of rapid heating and cooling. So have these new findings resolved this long-standing debate?

“We’ve had chemical evidence from meteorites that points to a supernova triggering our Solar System’s formation since the 1970s,” remarked lead author, Carnegie’s Alan Boss. “But the devil has been in the details. Until this study, scientists have not been able to work out a self-consistent scenario, where collapse is triggered at the same time that newly created isotopes from the supernova are injected into the collapsing cloud.”

Short-lived radioactive isotopes—versions of elements with the same number of protons, but a different number of neutrons—found in very old meteorites decay on time scales of millions of years and turn into different (so-called daughter) elements. Finding the daughter elements in primitive meteorites implies that the parent short-lived radioisotopes must have been created only a million or so years before the meteorites themselves were formed. “One of these parent isotopes, iron-60, can be made in significant amounts only in the potent nuclear furnaces of massive or evolved stars,” explained Boss. “Iron-60 decays into nickel-60, and nickel-60 has been found in primitive meteorites. So we’ve known where and when the parent isotope was made, but not how it got here.”

Cross-sectional view of one-half of a solar-mass target cloud being struck by a supernova shock front that is traveling downward. Credit: Carnigie Institution for Science

Previous models by Boss and former DTM Fellow Prudence Foster showed that the isotopes could be deposited into a pre-solar cloud if a shock wave from a supernova explosion slowed to 6 to 25 miles per second and the wave and cloud had a constant temperature of -440 °F (10 K). “Those models didn’t work if the material was heated by compression and cooled by radiation, and this conundrum has left serious doubts in the community about whether a supernova shock started these events over four billion years ago or not,” remarked Harri Vanhala, who found the negative result in his Ph.D. thesis work at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in 1997.

Using an adaptive mesh refinement hydrodynamics code, FLASH2.5, designed to handle shock fronts, as well as an improved cooling law, the Carnegie researchers considered several different situations. In all of the models, the shock front struck a pre-solar cloud with the mass of our Sun, consisting of dust, water, carbon monoxide, and molecular hydrogen, reaching temperatures as high as 1,340°F (1000 K). In the absence of cooling, the cloud could not collapse. However, with the new cooling law, they found that after 100,000 years the pre-solar cloud was 1,000 times denser than before, and that heat from the shock front was rapidly lost, resulting in only a thin layer with temperatures close to 1,340°F (1000 K). After 160,000 years, the cloud center had collapsed to become a million times denser, forming the protosun. The researchers found that isotopes from the shock front were mixed into the protosun in a manner consistent with their origin in a supernova.

“This is the first time a detailed model for a supernova triggering the formation of our solar system has been shown to work,” said Boss. “We started with a Little Bang 9 billion years after the Big Bang.”

Source: Carnegie Institution for Science

October 3, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Hubble’s Heritage

Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Acknowledgment: N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley)

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Here’s another anniversary for you and more fodder to either ease or add to your Hubble “angst”: Ten years ago, the Hubble Heritage Project began. What is Hubble Heritage? After the Hubble Space Telescope was fixed of its spherical aberration problem in December of 1993, HST started churning out incredible images. After a few years, the images started to pile up, and the astronomers working with Hubble wanted to share them with the public. So with the Hubble Heritage Project, each month, some of the most breathtaking and attractive images are released and showcased to the public. Along with the images, the astronomers explain the science behind the images, as well. Over the past ten years of doing this, the Heritage team has presented to the public aesthetic images that present the universe from an artistic perspective. Its science as art, and these images are some of the most gorgeous “real” art available anywhere. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of this project, above is the latest release. So while we await the fate of Hubble, enjoy this latest release!

This month’s three-dimensional-looking Hubble image shows the edge of the giant gaseous cavity within the star-forming region called NGC 3324. The glowing nebula has been carved out by intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from several hot, young stars. A cluster of extremely massive stars, located well outside this image in the center of the nebula, is responsible for the ionization of the nebula and excavation of the cavity.

The image also reveals dramatic dark towers of cool gas and dust that rise above the glowing wall of gas. The dense gas at the top resists the blistering ultraviolet radiation from the central stars, and creates a tower that points in the direction of the energy flow. The high-energy radiation blazing out from the hot young stars in NGC 3324 is sculpting the wall of the nebula by slowly eroding it away.

Located in the southern hemisphere, NGC 3324 is at the northwest corner of the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372), home of the Keyhole Nebula and the active, outbursting star Eta Carinae. The entire Carina Nebula Complex is located at a distance of roughly 7,200 light-years, and lies in the constellation Carina.

This image is a composite of data taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2).

The Hubble Heritage Project, which began in October 1998, has released nearly 130 images mined from the Hubble data archive as well as a number of observations taken specifically for the project.

Source: Hubble Heritage , HubbleSite

October 2, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Little Star Twinkles, Then Vanishes

Illustration of the flare from magnetar Swift J195509+261406. A starquake is probably what triggered the object's 40 optical flares. Credit: NASA/Swift/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet

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Swift has made another unusual discovery. The orbiting satellite detected a very strange star that “twinkled” with gamma rays, X-rays, and light — and then vanished. Back in June the satellite detected a spike of gamma-rays that lasted less than five seconds. But this high-energy flash wasn’t a gamma-ray burst — the birth cry of a black hole far across the universe. It was something much closer to home. During the next three days, the object brightened and faded in visible light. It flashed over 40 times! Eleven days later, it flashed again, this time at infrared wavelengths. Then, it disappeared from view!

Swift had reported the event’s position to astronomers all over the world, so within minutes, robotic telescopes turned to a spot in the constellation Vulpecula. It was cataloged as “Swift J195509+261406.” So, several astronomers had a look at this unusual object before it disappeared.

Astronomers think the object was a special kind of neutron star called a magnetar. “We are dealing with an object that was hibernating for decades before entering a brief activity period,” explains Alberto J. Castro-Tirado, lead author of the paper that was published in the Sept. 25 edition of Nature. “Magnetars remain quiet for decades.”

Although measuring only about 12 miles across — about the size of a city — neutron stars have the strongest magnetic fields in the cosmos. Sometimes, those magnetic fields are super strong — more than 100 times the strength of typical neutron stars.

Astronomers put these magnetic monsters in their own class: magnetars. Only about a dozen magnetars are known, but scientists suspect our galaxy contains many more. We just don’t see them because they’re quiet most of the time.

So what happened last year? Why did this previously unseen star begin behaving so badly? And why did it stop?

Combine a magnetar’s pumped-up magnetic field with its rapid spin, and sooner or later something has to give. Every now and then, the magnetar’s rigid crust snaps under the strain.

This “starquake” releases pent-up magnetic energy, which creates bursts of light and radiation. Once the star’s crust and magnetic field settle down, the star goes dark and disappears from our view. At least until the next quake.

Astronomers suspect that magnetars lose their punch as time passes, but Swift J195509+261406 provides the missing link between objects exhibiting regular activity and those that have settled into retirement — and invisibility.
“I love it when Swift enables a discovery like this,” says Neil Gehrels, the mission’s lead scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “The observatory is an astronomical robot built for gamma-ray burst studies, but it can also quickly point at other bizarre objects with bright flares.”

Read two papers published on this object here and here.

Source: Goddard Spaceflight Center

October 2, 2008April 26, 2016 by Nancy Atkinson

The Telescope Has a Birthday Party

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All sorts of anniversaries going on these days — yesterday was NASA’s 50th birthday, on Saturday, Oct. 4 is the 51st anniversary of Sputnik’s launch, and today we celebrate the birthday of the telescope. 400 years ago, officials in the Netherlands were pondering over a patent application by a spectacle maker named Hans Lipperhey. The patent was for a “device by means of which all things at a very great distance can be seen as if they were nearby.” This is the earliest known record of a telescope. A few months later, scientist Galileo Galilei would get his hands on one.

Over at Wired, they are having a big celebration for the telescope’s birthday, including an article by some writer named Nancy Atkinson that includes a gallery of images and descriptions of the ten largest ground-based telescopes on Earth. It’s called “Giants of Earth and Space.” But there’s all sort of other interesting features, including a place where you can upload your favorite astronomical image that was taken by a ground-based telescope.

So check it out to celebrate. But of course this biggest party will be next year — the whole year of 2009 in fact, during the International Year of Astronomy. Look for more info and features about all the great events and ways you can participate in future articles on Universe Today

October 2, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Best Ground-Based Image of Jupiter — Ever!

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Everyone loves twinkling stars and moonlit nights—EXCEPT astronomers. But astronomers are crafty people, so they’ve come up with ways to mitigate the distortion that Earth’s thick atmosphere causes for ground based telescopes (from which stars appear to twinkle). And now, a new image-correction technique has delivered the sharpest whole-planet ground-based picture ever. The Very Large Telescope (VLT) performed a record two-hour observation of Jupiter using a breakthrough technique to remove atmospheric blur. And what a result! Just take a look at that gorgeous image…And this new image reveals changes in Jupiter’s smog-like haze, probably in response to a planet-wide upheaval more than a year ago.

Being able to correct wide field images for atmospheric distortions has been the dream of scientists and engineers for decades. Astronomers used a new device called the Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator (MAD) prototype instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT)
The new images of Jupiter prove the value of the advanced technology used by MAD, which uses two or more guide stars instead of one as references to remove the blur caused by atmospheric turbulence over a field of view thirty times larger than existing techniques.

“This type of adaptive optics has a big advantage for looking at large objects, such as planets, star clusters or nebulae,” says lead researcher Franck Marchis, from UC Berkeley and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, USA. “While regular adaptive optics provides excellent correction in a small field of view, MAD provides good correction over a larger area of sky. And in fact, were it not for MAD, we would not have been able to perform these amazing observations.”

MAD allowed the researchers to observe Jupiter for almost two hours on 16 and 17 August 2008, a record duration, according to the observing team. They were able to take a series of 265 snapshots. Conventional adaptive optics systems using a single Jupiter moon as reference cannot monitor Jupiter for so long because the moon moves too far from the planet. The Hubble Space Telescope cannot observe Jupiter continuously for more than about 50 minutes, because its view is regularly blocked by the Earth during Hubble’s 96-minute orbit.

Using MAD, ESO astronomer Paola Amico, MAD project manager Enrico Marchetti and Sébastien Tordo from the MAD team tracked two of Jupiter’s largest moons, Europa and Io – one on each side of the planet – to provide a good correction across the full disc of the planet. “It was the most challenging observation we performed with MAD, because we had to track with high accuracy two moons moving at different speeds, while simultaneously chasing Jupiter,” says Marchetti.

With this unique series of images, the team found a major alteration in the brightness of the equatorial haze, which lies in a 16,000-kilometer wide belt over Jupiter’s equator. More sunlight reflecting off upper atmospheric haze means that the amount of haze has increased, or that it has moved up to higher altitudes. “The brightest portion had shifted south by more than 6,000 kilometers,” explains team member Mike Wong.

This conclusion came after comparison with images taken in 2005 by Wong and colleague Imke de Pater using the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble images, taken at infrared wavelengths very close to those used for the VLT study, show more haze in the northern half of the bright Equatorial Zone, while the 2008 VLT images show a clear shift to the south.

“The change we see in the haze could be related to big changes in cloud patterns associated with last year’s planet-wide upheaval, but we need to look at more data to narrow down precisely when the changes occurred,” declares Wong

Source: ESO

October 1, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Reflections of NASA at 50

NASA turns 50 years old today. On Oct. 1, 1958 the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics (NACA) officially became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “It was a relatively easy transition,” said Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong in a rare public appearance commemorating NASA’s anniversary. “We were already riding on rockets and research aircraft…We had merely to paint over the “C” in NACA and replace it with an “S” on our airplanes, our trucks and vans.” But beyond those cosmetic changes, what has NASA meant to the average citizen, the US and the world?

Because of NASA, Armstrong said, “Our knowledge of the universe around us has increased a thousand fold and more. We learned that Homo sapiens was not forever imprisoned by the gravitational field of Earth. Performance, efficiency, reliability and safety of aircraft have improved remarkably. We’ve sent probes throughout the solar system and beyond. We’ve seen deeply into our universe and looked backward nearly to the beginning of time.”

Armstrong didn’t say the space race of the 1960’s prevented a war between the US and the USSR, but said it was a diversion. “It was intense,” he said. “It did allow both sides to take the high road with the objectives of science and learning and exploration.”

But eventually, the competition became cooperation, and while the current partnership between the US, Russia and 14 other countries who have joined together to create the International Space Station isn’t perfect, it is a platform for continued collaboration between the various entities.

As for how NASA has directly affected the average citizen, there’s a plethora of everyday devices and technologies we take for granted that might not be at our disposal without NASA. There’s a nice list here, and everyone should take a look at NASA’s Spinoff website.

Some say NASA is in a midlife crisis. Some say NASA is out of touch. Some look at NASA and think of what could have been. In a speech at the same gala event where Armstrong spoke, NASA’s own administrator Mike Griffin said, “We’re not, on our 50th anniversary, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the first [human] landing on Mars – and we could have been.”

NASA gets plenty of criticism. Some is deserved; some things are out of the space agency’s control. Some argue NASA needs more funding, some say NASA doesn’t manage the funds they have very well. Nonetheless, current estimates say for every dollar we spend on the space program, the U.S. economy receives about $8 of economic benefit. That’s an excellent rate of return, whether we’re in good economic times or bad.

While not everything about NASA can be measured in monetary terms, NASA is an investment.

Personally, NASA has been in existence my entire life. My sister and I camped out in front of the television set for each moon landing. Even though I was pretty young and didn’t understand everything, I knew the events I was watching unfold were bigger than just two men bouncing around on the Moon’s surface and bigger than the country whose flag was planted in the lunar regolith. This was humanity at its best, and a triumph of the spirit and ingenuity that lies within each of us. But those qualities aren’t only in NASA’s past; they’re here right now, too. I still feel that spirit, ingenuity and excitement when I get to share the latest events of a space mission, or have the opportunity to talk with a NASA engineer who helped with an important mission milestone, or an astronomer who just made an incredible discovery.

“Our highest and most important hope is that the human race will improve its intelligence, its character, and its wisdom,” said Armstrong, as he concluded his speech.

NASA, as well as all the world’s space agencies and organizations, have helped in that effort, and given humanity the opportunity to strive for those qualities.

Happy birthday, NASA, and many more.

Source of quotes for Armstrong and Griffin: New Scientist

October 1, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Where In the Universe Challenge #23

Here’s this week’s image for the “Where In The Universe” challenge. Take a look at the image above and guess what this image might be. Extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image as well. No peeking below before you make your guess. Ready? You may begin….

You probably just knew I had the Hubble Space Telescope on the brain this week. With its data controller failure, I’ve been browsing Hubble images all week, sighing and hoping (thinking happy thoughts, as I said in an earlier post!) I’ve also spent the past few days cleaning out a closet, so this image fits my current state of mind on all fronts. Its a Hubble image of cosmic dust bunnies. In the image are blobs of cosmic dust lie hidden in the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1316.

I realize its hard to know the names of all the galaxies out there, so you are a winner if you said “galaxy” and “Hubble.”

The image shows dust lanes and star clusters in this giant galaxy. Astronomers say these characteristics give a clue as to how this galaxy was formed.

Astronomers conclude that these dusty star clusters give clear evidence of a major collision of two spiral, gas-rich galaxies. The galaxies would have merged together a few billion years ago to shape NGC 1316 as it appears today.

NGC 1316 is about 75 million light-years away on the outskirts of a nearby cluster of galaxies in the southern constellation of Fornax. It is one of the brightest ellipticals in the Fornax galaxy cluster and is also one of the strongest and largest radio sources in the sky.

See more info about this image at the HubbleSite.

October 1, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

New Findings Challenge “Dynamo Effect” of Galactic Magnetic Fields

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. Credit: NRAO/AUI

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A team of astronomers has obtained the first direct measurement of a young galaxy’s magnetic field, and were surprised at their findings. Using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope, the researchers were able to peer back in time, to gauge the nascent galaxy’s magnetic field as it appeared 6.5 billion years ago. Surprisingly, the magnetic field of this distant “protogalaxy” is at least 10 times greater than the average value in the Milky Way. “This was a complete surprise,” said Arthur Wolfe, a professor of physics at UC San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences who headed the team. “The magnetic field we measured is at least an order of magnitude larger than the average value of the magnetic field detected in our own galaxy.” So what does this mean for the “dynamo effect” theory of galactic magnetic fields?

Astronomers have believed the magnetic fields within our own Milky Way and other nearby galaxies—which control the rate of star formation and the dynamics of interstellar gas–arose from a slow “dynamo effect.” In this process, slowly rotating galaxies are thought to have generated magnetic fields that grew very gradually as they evolved over 5 billion to 10 billion years to their current levels.
Until recently, astronomers knew very little about magnetic fields outside our own galaxy, having directly measured the magnetic field in only one nearby galaxy.

But in July of this year, a team of Swiss and American astronomers reported that an indirect measurement of the magnetic fields of 20 distant galaxies, using the bright light from quasars, suggests that the magnetic fields of young galaxies were as strong when the universe was only a third of its current age as they are in the mature galaxies today.

And now, this most recent direct detection of a galactic magnetic field seems to cast doubt on the dynamo effect as well. Astronomers from the University of California campuses at Berkeley probed a young protogalaxy DLA-3C286, located in a region of the northern sky that is directly overhead during the spring.

However, Wolfe said those indirect measurements and his team’s latest direct measurement of a distant galaxy’s magnetic field “do not necessarily cast doubt on the leading theory of magnetic field generation, the mean-field-dynamo model, which predicts that the magnetic field strengths should be much weaker in galaxies in the cosmological past.”

“Our results present a challenge to the dynamo model, but they do not rule it out,” he added. “Rather the strong field that we detect is in gas with little if no star formation, and an interesting implication is that the presence of the magnetic fields is an important reason why star formation is very weak in these types of protogalaxies.”

Wolfe said his team has two other plausible explanations for what they observed. “We speculate that either we are seeing a field toward the central regions of a massive galaxy, since magnetic fields are known to be larger towards the centers of nearby galaxies. It is also possible that the field we detect has been amplified by a shock wave generated by the collision between two galaxies.”

“In either case,” he added, “our detection indicates that magnetic fields may be important factors in the evolution of galaxies, and in particular may be responsible for the low star formation rates detected throughout the gaseous progenitors of young galaxies in the early universe.”

“The challenge now,” said J. Xavier Prochaska, another member of the team who is a professor of astronomy at UC Santa Cruz, “is to perform observations like these on galaxies throughout the universe.”

The giant radio telescope, can be pointed with an accuracy of one arcsecond–equivalent to the width of a single human hair seen six feet away–enabled the astronomers to measure the magnetic field of a single galaxy.

Source: UC San Diego

October 1, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Phoenix Lander Will Listen to the Sounds of Mars

Phoenix MARDI. Credit: NASA / JPL / MSSS

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We may be able to hear, for the first time, what it sounds like on the surface of Mars. The Phoenix Lander has a microphone on board, which will be switched on in upcoming days of operations. “This is definitely a first,” said Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith. The microphone is a part of the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) system on the underside of the lander designed to take images of Mars’ surface during the lander’s descent. However, the system was never used. Tests of the system during the flight to Mars revealed the possibility that using it might cause other parts of the landing system to not function correctly. But using it later wasn’t ruled out. So, after updated software is sent to the lander, the microphone will be turned on.

You may recall, Mars Express recorded the sounds of Phoenix descending (which sounded like Phoenix was screaming in delight!) But now we may be able to hear the sounds of Mars itself – a truly wondrous possibility.

There’s no guarantee the microphone will work, however. Once the system is checked and updated, the team plans to attempt turning the microphone on while the lander is digging or using the rasp on end of its robotic arm scoop, “just to make sure we hear something,” Smith said. “You at least want to know if there’s a chance of noise being created.”

No one knows what Mars sounds like, and Phoenix scientists aren’t sure how well the microphone will be able to pick up any noise. Smith said the microphone is similar to what is used on a standard cell phone. Also, sound waves don’t travel on Mars as they do Earth because of Mars’ thin atmosphere. It would be similar to listening to sound at an altitude of about 30,500 meters (100,000 feet) above Earth’s surface, Smith said.

If the team can hear Phoenix’s operations, then they’ll turn the microphone on while Phoenix is quiet and wait for any sounds.

Additionally, the descent imager might be turned on, as well. This provides the opportunity to take close up images directly underneath the lander, where the “Holy Cow” feature – which appears to be a large chunk of ice – is located.

The imager might also be able to look at the clumps of materials that appear to be “growing” on Phoenix’s legs. The clumps are probably bits of Mars soil that “splashed” up on the legs during landing, but some of the clumps have moved around and appear to be increasing in size over the duration of the mission. Mission scientists aren’t sure what the clumps are and why they have such unusual behavior.

“It’s one of those wonderful Martian mysteries,” Smith said.

Post Script & Corrections: Thanks to Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society for providing the correct image and information of the MARDI! The first image I had posted was of the Mars Microphone that the Planetary Society sent along with the Mars Polar Lander mission in 1999. Also, I incorrectly stated that the MARDI instrument was the same as the Mars Microphone on the MPL.

Sources: Planetary Blog, Space.com

September 30, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Virgin Galactic Wants to Do Science, Too

The White Knight. Credit: Virgin Galactic

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The company that aims to be the first “spaceline,” by taking paying passenger to space on a regular basis is also looking at contributing to science, too. Virgin Galactic is looking at the possibility of carrying scientific instruments on board the aircraft that brings its spaceship skyward. Richard Branson is teaming up with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to gather information about atmospheric composition and particularly greenhouse gases. NOAA is interested in flying atmospheric monitoring instruments on the carrier vehicle WhiteKnightTwo, because it will be in regular flight above 50,000 ft for the next year-and-a-half during its test-flight period. “Almost everything NOAA does at the moment is at 25,000ft (7,600m) maximum altitude. It’s quite difficult to find research aircraft that do atmospheric testing above that,” said Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic.

“One of the things that we as an airline operator know is that the tropopause is rising slightly. That has had quite an effect on aircraft flying in the upper atmosphere and the amount of turbulence they get. This is probably related to the mix of greenhouse gases and the levels they are rising to that’s moving the tropopause up,” said Whitehorn to journalists at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Glasgow.

SpaceShipTwo will be carried to about 15,200 m (50,000 ft) by the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft. The spaceship then ignites a rocket engine, taking passengers to a maximum altitude of 110 km (68 miles).

The vehicle would carry three instruments. One is going to measure CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. The second will take “flask samples”, allowing it to test for a much wider range of gases. These samples will be offloaded from the aircraft and taken to NOAA’s laboratories in Boulder, Colorado.

The third experiment will carry a tube sample, which empties of gases on the way up to high altitude and fills up on the way down.

Mr Whitehorn said that when SpaceShipTwo began flying, it could provide NOAA with regular sampling of gases through the outermost region of the atmosphere – known as the ionosphere – up to 110km above Earth.

This would be important for calibrating data from a major satellite mission called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), which is designed to measure atmospheric carbon. The joint NOAA-NASA mission is due to launch next year.

The early part of the agreement between Virgin Galactic and NOAA is on a “no exchange of funds” basis, said Whitehorn, because it was currently classified as an experimental program.

SpaceShipTwo is currently 60% complete. The company plans to unveil the finished craft next summer. Virgin Galactic said 280 customers have signed up for flights to the edge of space.

Source: BBC