New research from NASA shows that cities in the United States have been built on the most fertile soils of the nation - cities account for just 3% of its land area, but food grown there could out produce the 29% of the US which is currently used for agriculture. The researchers used data two NASA satellites to track plant growth and the locations of urban centres. They created a computer model for a potential pre-urban US landscape which they used to calculate how much the country's vegetation growth is diminished because of cities.
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Now in orbit for more than a month, the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has been delivering mountains of data back to Earth. Here's a beautiful desktop wallpaper you can use for your computer: an image taken on January 21, 2004 of the caldera of Olympus Mons, the largest known mountain in the Solar System. Olympus Mons is 22 km high and the caldera has a depth of 3 km.
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Many of the sky's most interesting objects, like gamma-ray bursts and supernovae, change within days or even hours. It's very difficult for traditional observatories to dedicate the kind of time required to watch the evolution of these objects, but a new class of instruments will help astronomers stay on top of them. ULTRACAM will track changes in brightness that last only a thousandths of a second, while Super WASP can watch an area of sky 1000x the size of the Moon, looking for anything unusual. And a new network of robotic telescopes could be the best tool for spotting Earth-like planets around other stars until big space observatories are launched in the next decade.
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Using a NASA aircraft which flies over the Arctic, Harvard scientists have made observations of a molecule which is believed to be responsible for destroying stratospheric ozone. The substance is called chlorine peroxide, and it's formed from industrial materials used in refrigeration. These have been banned for several years, but they can persist in the high atmosphere for decades. This new data will allow scientists to better forecast the future degradation of the ozone layer, and regions which might let in more solar radiation.
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After it had finished examining "Adirondack", NASA's Spirit rover drove right over it and kept on moving for another 6.4 metres. This was the first test of the rover's autonomous navigation system, which steered it clear of rocks as it moved towards a crater 250 metres away. Opportunity completed its journey to the rocky outcropping on the side of the crater that the rover landed in. Close examination of the bedrock showed strange spheres of sand embedded into the layers of rock.
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NASA has swapped out the next crew headed for the International Space Station. Astronaut Michael Fincke and cosmonaut Gennady Padalka will be replacing Russian Valery Tokarev and American Leroy Chiao. Russian space officials said that it wasn't because the team was unprofessional or ill, just that it hadn't had enough time to be ready for space - Leroy Chiao was only added to the team last month when astronaut William McArthur fell ill. Fincke and Padalka are due to blast off on from the Baikonur cosmodrome with Dutchman Andre Kuipers in a Soyuz rocket on April 19.
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Canadian government and business officials today announced the development of a new microsatellite called CASSIOPE which will serve a dual role in science and commercial communications. Scheduled for launch in 2007, CASSIOPE will carry a suite of eight scientific instruments called ePOP to study the effect of the Sun on the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field. The satellite will also serve as a high bandwidth information courier, picking up data and delivering it to anywhere in the world.
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Astronomers from several US universities have developed a scenario where colliding black holes could be ejected from their galaxy. When two galaxies merge, their central supermassive black holes will orbit one another and eventually collide. When this merge happens, the radiation pressure is so large that it could theoretically knock the black hole out of the centre of the galaxy. Although it should be incredibly rare, it could be possible to spot a black hole in a recently merged galaxy which isn't at the centre where it normally belongs.
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NASA engineers commanded the Opportunity rover to drive forward 3.5 metres from its previous position towards the rocky outcrop on the side of the Martian crater. Instead of digging a trench into the soil, the mission scientists have decided they want to go directly to the outcrop to get some close up pictures. On the other side of Mars, the controllers for Spirit have successfully reformatted its flash memory, which should fix all remaining traces of the problem that plagued the rover over the last few weeks.
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An Atlas IIAS rocket successfully launched the AMC-10 satellite on Thursday evening from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket lifted off at 2346 UTC (6:46 pm EST), and the satellite separated 28 minutes later. The launch was delayed nearly and hour because of problems with a helium valve. Lockheed Martin built the AMC-10 satellite, which will provide regular and high-definition television broadcasting services in the US.
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Researchers from the University of Queensland believe they have more evidence that supports the theory that NASA researchers found life in a Martian meteorite back in 1996. Their new technique uses an electron microscope to see through the bacteria and into the gel surrounding the magnetic crystals inside the creature. Their research indicates that the bacteria likely lived four billion years ago, before life was even believed to have formed here on Earth. Their research was published in the Journal of Microscopy.
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The European Space Agency has given the lander portion of the Rosetta mission a name: Philae. This is the name of an island in the Nile where a French explorer, Jean-Fran?ois Champollion, discovered an obelisk with a bilingual inscription of the names Cleopatra and Ptolemy. This gave Champollion the clues he needed to decipher the Rosetta stone, and begin translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The name was proposed by a 15-year old girl from Italy. If all goes well, Rosetta will lift off on February 26 to begin its 10-year mission to reach and land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
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Scientists on Earth have investigated the microscopic pictures of Martian soil returned by NASA's Opportunity rover, and found features that are unlike anything seen on Mars before, including spherical particles that could have been formed by the erosion of water. Opportunity also used its instruments to create a mineral map of the area, and discovered large quantities of hematite right at the surface, especially near the rim of the crater which the rover landed in. Engineers will have the rover drive forward about 3 metres - halfway to the outcrop of rock - and dig a trench with its wheel to see material down a few centimetres.
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The latest image released from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals spiral galaxy M64 in a new light. Nicknamed the "Black Eye" galaxy because of the dark bands of obscuring clouds, M64 is well known to amateur astronomers because of how it looks in small telescopes. What's unique to M64 is that the stars rotate in one direction, while the interstellar gas in the outer regions goes in the opposite direction - likely the outcome of a galactic collision.
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The newest photo released from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the nearby dwarf galaxy NGC 1569, which is a hotbed of vigorous star birth activity. These stellar nurseries blow huge bubbles of gas and dust that riddle the structure of the galaxy. NGC 1569 is only 7 million light-years away, so astronomers can study the galaxy in great detail.
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Some of the first images sent back to Earth by NASA's Opportunity rover are of exposed layered rock which could have been formed gradually by water - where there's water, there could have been life. Astrobiologist Andrew Knoll is a science team member with the rover missions, and a Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. He explains how scientists search for extreme life on Earth, and how discoveries here could help the rovers spot evidence of past life on Mars.
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NASA's Opportunity rover took a close look at the Martian soil near its landing site yesterday with its microscope, and controllers released the first colour images today. What's unusual about the soil is just how many spherical-shaped particles there are. There are only a few processes which can create this shape of particles, such as the gentle rolling at the bottom of an ocean. It's possible for a volcano or asteroid impact to create spherical particles; globs of lava can freeze in mid-air as they're ejected. The largest pebble in this image is approximately 3 mm across.
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A team of astronomers have discovered what seem to be clouds of hydrogen gas which were left over when the Andromeda galaxy formed. The clouds were discovered using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), which is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope. Galaxies like Andromeda, and our own Milky Way, were thought to have formed by the continuous merging of smaller galaxies as well as the accretion of clouds of hydrogen. Astronomers had been unable to find these clouds until now.
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Using satellite data, scientists think they might have a way to give some advance warning of landslides, which kill hundreds of people around the world every year. Scientists know that regions which are about to turn into a landslide can shift slightly. Local observers would never notice a few millimeters of movement, but it's possible for satellites to track it from space using a technique called radar interferometry. Analysts compare multiple images of the same location which allows them to highlight regions which have shifted slightly.
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NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced on Monday that seven hills to the east of the Spirit rover's landing site would be named for the astronauts who lost their lives when the space shuttle Columbia was destroyed. The hills are between 3 and 5 kilometres away from Spirit's landing spot, and NASA will submit them to the International Astronomical Union for official designation.
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At the end of February 2004, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft is expected to launch on board an Ariane 5 launcher from the space centre in Kourou, French Guiana. Rosetta will travel 675 million kilometres, including multiple planet flybys to reach Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014 - it will orbit the comet and then actually land on its surface. This journey will be a long time coming, since Rosetta has been in development since 1997, and missed several launch opportunities.
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Both of NASA's twin rovers are now ready to perform a scientific study of Mars with the suite of tools at the end of their robotic arms. Opportunity extended its arm for the first time today, while Spirit has been locked with its arm stretched out for the last few weeks. Controllers will have Opportunity examine a patch of soil right in front with its microscope and Moessbauer Spectrometer, and then it will turn the arm and look at another patch with its alpha particle X-ray spectrometer. This should tell scientists back at Earth what minerals are in the soil.
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After 10 days of recovery work, engineers at NASA have given Spirit a clean bill of health; the rover is now booting up normally. The recovery happened after controllers deleted thousands of files loaded up in the rover's memory; most of which was stored up from the seven-month flight from the Earth to Mars. The engineers are still planning to completely wipe the memory to start with a clean slate, and then reinstall all the software. Spirit will continue examining a rock called Adirondack later this week with its suite of scientific tools.
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An unmanned Russian Progress cargo ship docked with the International Space Station on Saturday, delivering over two tones of food, water, fuel, supplies and scientific equipment. Progress 13 automatically docked to the Zvezda Service Module at 1313 UTC (8:13am EST) Saturday afternoon. This is the first spacecraft to visit the station since astronaut Michael Foale and cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri were launched more than 100 days ago.
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Astronomers made news in early 2003 with a precise measurement for the age of the Universe - 13.7 billion years - using data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite. But new research from the University of Durham indicates that our view into the past might be skewed by clusters of galaxies which seem to be in regions where the microwave energy is lower. It's possible that hot gas in the galaxy clusters is interfering with photons from the Big Bang, and has corrupted the microwave map of the sky. These results may undermine theories about how the early Universe was dominated by dark matter and dark energy.
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Michael Benson, author of Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes (
read Universe Today's review) took some time from his busy schedule, and nasty cold, to answer some of our questions about his book and interest in astronomy and space exploration. Benson was interviewed by
Mark Mortimer.
New data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope shows that a previously discovered extrasolar gas giant which has oxygen and carbon in its atmosphere evaporating at a tremendous rate. The planet - officially called HD 209458; unofficially "Osiris" - orbits its star at only 7 million km and has created an extended ellipse of material around the star. This discovery has caused astronomers to propose a new kind of object called a cthonian: the dead cores of gas giants which have been stripped of their atmosphere.
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Filmmaker James Cameron (Titanic, Aliens) is an advocate for human missions to Mars, and feels that quality images will go a long way to help boost the public's enthusiasm for space. While working on a book, miniseries and possible 3-D movie, Cameron did a tremendous amount of research looking through NASA material, and produced a series of images that might help showcase what the key phases and hardware of a human mission to Mars might look like.
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NASA's Opportunity rover successfully rolled off its lander today and out onto the Martian surface - both rovers are now firmly on Martian soil. The commands to drive were given Saturday morning, and cheers erupted at JPL when the first images came back showing tracks in the dust back to the lander. "We're two for two! One dozen wheels on the soil." JPL's Chris Lewicki, flight director, announced to the control room. The flight team ended up only requiring seven days to get Opportunity off the lander, compared to twelve days for Spirit.
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New data gathered by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows how stars can be more durable than previously thought. Astronomers measured the light from an object called V471, which is believed to be a white dwarf and Sun-like star orbiting one another very tightly. The white dwarf used to be a red giant star many times larger than our own Sun which blew up so large the Sun-like star was completely engulfed, but it actually survived the ordeal; it bears the unique signature of material that it accreted while it was inside the giant's envelope.
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NASA's Spirit rover has gotten back to work sending pictures back to Earth, now that engineers have worked through most of the problems that plagued the rover over the last week. Spirit took a picture of its robotic arm, extended out towards a rock, to show that it was still in the same position when the glitches occurred. On the other side of the planet, Opportunity's landing platform was tilted forward to prepare for the rover's exit on Sunday or Monday.
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People usually associate squads of bespectacled engineers and scientists as being the sole guardians of space. Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes by Michael Benson is the type of book that rationalizes and moreover encourages the inclusion of other specialists, especially those in the arts. Containing 295 photographs chosen both for their artistic, awe inspiring impact as well as their voluminous scientific content, the reader will want to quickly put aside numerical calculations about orbital mechanics and let their eyes float across the vistas of other planets.
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Dr. Nathalie Cabrol, a planetary geologist with the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center, has been working for more than a decade to explore the mysteries of Gusev Crater - the spot where the Spirit rover landed earlier this month. Dr. Cabrol, and her husband Dr. Edmond Grin initially proposed the landing spot to NASA because the area seems to once have held an ancient lakebed.
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Researchers from the Australian National University have created a prototype thruster that could offer a new form of propulsion for spacecraft. The thruster is called the Helicon Double Layer Thruster (HDLT), and it works by passing hydrogen atoms through a magnetic field to create a beam of plasma. Like an ion engine, it's electrically powered and very efficient - solar arrays could provide the energy to power the thruster. Other agencies, including NASA, are working on plasma thrusters, but this is the first to be proven to work with hydrogen.
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NASA controllers gave Opportunity the commands on Wednesday that would begin the process of getting the rover to stand up from its compact landing configuration. The rover has untucked its front wheels and latched its suspension system in place. Controllers are going to try and tilt the landing platform forward 5-degrees to make it easier for Opportunity to roll of the platform next week - possibly as early as Sunday or Monday. Repairs are continuing on Spirit, but operators don't have full control of the lander yet.
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A Russian-built Progress spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome today atop a Soyuz booster. Mission 13P is carrying a full load of supplies and scientific equipment and will reach the International Space Station within two days. The spaceship will deliver two dummies designed to measure the long-term effects of space radiation on the human body; one will be attached to the outside of the station to get a direct exposure. The station's previous Progress ship was detached on Wednesday to make room.
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NASA announced today that it has dedicated Opportunity's landing site to the crew of the space shuttle Challenger, which were killed when the shuttle was destroyed shortly after takeoff on January 28, 1986 - 18 years ago today. Its new name will be The Challenger Memorial Station. This joins memorials for the Columbia and Apollo 1 crews which were also recently announced.
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New data gathered by NASA's Topex/Poseidon and Jason satellites seems to indicate that the cooler and drier periods in Southern California are a direct result of a long-term ocean pattern called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. By measuring the ocean and atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, forecasters can predict the temperatures and rainfall estimates for up to a year in advance. The full cycle of this effect can last 50 years, and right now the trend is towards a drier climate for the next five years.
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NASA has memorialized the three members of Apollo 1 by naming terrain near the Spirit rover's landing site. Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire when their capsule was being tested exactly 37 years ago. Grissom Hill is located 7.5 km to the southwest of Spirit's landing location; White Hill is 11.2 km to the northwest; and Chaffee hill is 14.3 km south-southwest.
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When selecting targets for Spirit and Opportunity, NASA engineers were very cautious about where the rovers could land. They needed to choose targets which had a low elevation, flat terrain, and free of large boulders that could destroy the spacecraft. Fortunately, both Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum have enough scientific value to make the trip worthwhile. Since the airbag technology has been so successful, future missions might get a little more dangerous, like landing on a volcano.
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The most intriguing part about Opportunity's landing spot is the big slab of bedrock exposed on the rim of the crater the rover is in. The region is important because it means that planetary geologists know where this rock was formed - right there. Other rocks can be moved by water and wind erosion, volcanic events or asteroid impacts, but this bedrock hasn't been moved. When the rover is ready to drive off its lander, it will climb up to the bedrock and examine it carefully for any layers that could answer if there was once standing water in this region. And where there was once water, there could be life.
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When US President George W. Bush announced his government's new space initiative, to return humans to the Moon and then on to Mars, many space advocacy groups saw this as an opportunity to advance the goals of space exploration. The Mars Society recently announced their analysis and recommendations about the initiative. Overall, the society welcomed the new policies, but felt there was room for improvement in several areas, including an emphasis on acquiring heavy lift boosters and developing methods for creating fuel, water, etc on the Moon or Mars.
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Opportunity has tested out the three scientific sensing tools on its robotic arm, and it appears they all survived the brutal entry and landing on Mars without a problem. The spacecraft took its first 24-image panoramic view of its surroundings which clearly shows the discoloured soil where the rover bounced inside an impact crater. Opportunity is still more than a week away from the point where it too will be rolled onto the Martian surface. On the other side of the planet, repairs on Spirit are ongoing, but it's not clear when the rover will be able to continue its mission.
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Astronomers working with the Gemini observatory were able to make detailed observations of an aging star only a little while before it exploded as a supernova. The star was first imaged a year ago as part of a comprehensive survey of galaxies. When the supernova was discovered in June 2003, astronomers found out its precise position with the Hubble Space Telescope. They could then look back through the photos taken with Gemini, and spot the exact star that exploded - it was 10 times more massive, and 500 times larger than our own Sun.
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Using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and Integral observatories, astronomers have discovered glowing X-ray halos around powerful, but short-lived, gamma ray bursts (GRBs). GRBs are the most energetic explosions in the known Universe, and could be created when a giant star turns into a black hole. The halos are created when the radiation from the GRB scatters through two clouds of gas and dust located only few thousand light-years away.
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After three more days of intense searching for the Beagle 2 lander, team leader Colin Pillinger said, "we have to begin to accept that, if Beagle 2 is on the Martian surface, it is not active." Before they completely give up hope, however, they're going to have the Mars Odyssey spacecraft send a command that will force the lander to reload its software. The lander should have entered a special mode on January 22 that kept it turned on all day and communicating.
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