I’ve not had time to look at this closely, but there’s been some remarkable news about the possible detection of water in the atmosphere of an extra-solar planet. Wow!
Like I said, I’ve not a lot of time to look at this (Nature paper here), but thought you should know. I can point you to a press release by the Spitzer Space Telescope team, which starts: […] Click to continue reading this post
I was just reading a bit about the spacecraft Phoenix (a mission to Mars to launch very […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, not until September at the earliest, that is. (Oh! That feels so good to have finally been able to use that as a post title!)
What am I talking about? NASA’s Dawn mission, of course. Dawn is a spacecraft that will go to the asteroid belt to study more closely the two largest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta. (Image right is an artist’s impression of the spacecraft. credit: William K. Hartmann, Courtesy of UCLA) In addition to the mission page linked above, there’s also a nice Wikipedia article about it here.
Last Thursday was to be the launch, but there were problems due to weather (mostly) – you don’t want to be fueling the tanks of the launch vehicle when there is high risk of lightning, as there was that day. There’s more about the matters on the NASA site, and also and Amara’s post on Scientific Blogging.
Actually, her post there is extremely informative about the goals of the mission, and […] Click to continue reading this post
What is this? The story behind this is just hilarious! I laughed out loud for a good while. […] Click to continue reading this post
After reading an article about how the “trickle of planet discoveries” as become a “flood” -referring to the many discoveries of extrasolar planets that are being announced these days, since they first started being discovered in 1995 1988/9 (there are more than 200 known now)- I looked at space.com’s “top ten most intriguing extrasolar planets”.
[Update: First detection of extrasolar planets is probably more accurately to be dated 1988/9. The first confirmed one was in 1995, but the planet Gamma_Cephei_Ab, detected in 1988(9) by two separate teams, took until 2002 to be confirmed. See e.g. here for more. Thanks commenter molliska!]
Have a look at that interesting article about the pace of discovery, and then when you’re done, peruse the top ten here. You’ll find:
Remember our discussions of Pluto’s demotion/reclassification? (Lots of link reminders at bottom of post.) Well, here’s a sad (and amusing) image* created by artist Mathias Pedersen:
You can see a high resolution version of this image here. Don’t forget to look at more of of the graphic art of Mathias Pedersen**.
Poor Pluto indeed!
(Take some time to appreciate how good a job he’s done on colours and other features of the […] Click to continue reading this post
So the planet hunter Corot has found its first extra-solar planet. It is a bit bigger than Jupiter, and orbiting awfully close to its sun-like star. Artist’s impression, from ESA, to the right. Click for larger.
From a BBC article by Rebecca Morelle:
The new body is called Corot-exo-1b and can be found 1,500 light-years away in the constellation of Monoceros.
also:
Spotted on the BBC News website: A story about the discovery of an earth-like (or at least more Earth-like than Jupiter-like) planet in the “Goldilocks” zone of a star a mere 20 light years or so away!
Scientists made the discovery using the Eso 3.6m Telescope in Chile.
They say the benign temperatures on the planet mean any water there could exist in liquid form, and this raises the chances it could also harbour life.
“We have estimated that the mean temperature of this ‘super-Earth’ lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid,” explained Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory, lead author of the scientific paper reporting the result.
“Moreover, its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth’s radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky – like our Earth – or covered with oceans.”
Reading a bit further on: […] Click to continue reading this post
You can read more on the Cassini site about this wonderful shot of Saturn from a […] Click to continue reading this post
There’s a nice story about new photographic evidence from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for water having flowed on Mars. It is not really as dramatic as the photographs of late last year, but it is still an important piece of the puzzle overall (so do read about it), if harder to sell to the public as a “stop-the-press!” type of story. So here’s how three different news agencies tried to bring you in:
Not bad. The layering and colour gradations seen are is not direct evidence of water, of course. It could have been some other fluid flow, but…ok.
Next, we have: Click to continue reading this post
The Bad Astronomy Blog gives a top ten list of astronomy images for 2006. There are some really wonderful choices there, and Phil Plait gives a good deal of discussion of each one. The winner is this fantastic back-lit (by the sun, not some giant NASA flashgun) image of Saturn taken -of course- by the Cassini mission:
Now there’s another wonderful feature of this photo that makes it such a clear winner. […] Click to continue reading this post
This is a diagram of the layout of the equipment on the Corot (COnvection, ROtation and planetary Transits) space telescope, launched recently from a site in Kazakhstan:
It’s a European Space Agency (ESA) mission, primarily run by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES – the French Space Agency, if you will) and it’s going to be looking closely at about 120,000 stars for signs of planetary bodies in orbit around them, in addition to studying the stars themselves. There’s a BBC story here, with video, more figured and images, and links to other sites, such as this condensed mission guide. The Proteus platform in the diagram refers to that fact that this is but one of a series of craft in the “Proteus†series, the platform itself being the design of the core containing the instrumentation and control systems of the device. Learn more about that here.
By going over to ESA’s site, you can learn a lot more about the scientific objectives and […] Click to continue reading this post
In case you have not heard, NASA announced today that they have evidence that water flows on Mars. That’s the present tense, note. Not flowed some time ago – flows currently (albeit perhaps only in intermittent bursts). Here’s the link to their announcement. The picture:
[image]
An extract: Click to continue reading this post
The Eye of Sauron is rising again, but now on Saturn!?
No, here’s what’s actually going on:
On the site Space.com, I found a nice article by David Powell about the Cassini spacecraft’s future. (Cassini has done some wonderful work recently, including bringing us wonderful images such as the one below of Titan and Epimetheus, and Saturn’s rings.)
[image]
Cassini’s NASA handlers are wondering about what they will do with it when its mission is over. Here are some of the options they are considering:
