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Charon: Dark horse in search for life It’s the most distant moon known, out where our sun is a cold point of light. But scientists say Charon, the icy satellite of the planet Pluto, ranks as a prime target in their study of the conditions that could sustain life. |
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Seeing the Universe's Red Dawn Hidden in a corner of the nondescript patch of sky called the Hubble Deep Field, astronomers have found what may be the farthest and oldest galaxies ever seen. |
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Galileo making space history as it begins new rendezvous After almost a decade and half a billion miles, the space probe Galileo on Sunday begins its final series of encounters with Jupiter's moons. |
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Russian setbacks to delay space station, again Russian officials have quietly informed NASA that the next piece of the International Space Station won't be ready to launch until late September instead of July, adding to concerns about Russia's commitment to the project. |
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Universe put on the map Astronomers have produced the largest-ever map of the cosmos, which they say answers some of our deepest questions about the universe. |
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Probe Reduces Orbit NASA’s Lunar Prospector probe, which has gathered a wealth of data including evidence of water on the moon since it began its mission last year, is now dropping into an even closer orbit to scan out new details of Earth’s nearest neighbor. |
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NASA Comet Mission May Reveal a Galaxy of Data In just over a week, NASA plans to rocket an 848-pound craft nearly 250 million miles into space to collect the grains of a comet that have remained unchanged since the day they were formed. |
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GOTCHA! The Big One That Didn't Get Away Robotic telescope captures visible light from a powerful gamma-ray burst. For the first time, scientists have witnessed the visible light emitted at the same time as a gamma-ray burst, a mysterious explosion in the far reaches of the universe. |
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Theorists And Theologians Contemplate The Implications Of Modern Cosmology If cosmology embodies a culture's commonly held notions about the nature of the universe, then what is the cosmology of modern Western culture? |
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Look down to look up See also: Experts Study Earth Plants, Animals For Use by Space Colonists and Can Earth's species live elsewhere? NASA has been explaining its research programme to look for extraterrestrial life. Its Astrobiology Institute - a 'virtual' institute linking 11 different labs via the Internet - has come up with the 'roadmap' it hopes will lead it to its goal. The map begins on Earth. |
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Scientists Catch First-Ever 'Live' Gamma Ray Burst See also: A ‘Live’ Gamma Burst U.S. and European scientists said Jan.26 that they had caught their first ever "live" picture of a gamma-ray burst-- powerful explosions from space that have mystified and intrigued astronomers for decades. |
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Binaries Answer Riddle of Brown Dwarf Origins Unlike planets, which take shape from debris that remains after the formation of their parent sun, a brown dwarf can form on its own out of interstellar gas and dust, like any respectable star. |
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NASA Craft to Take the Controls in Flight Both science fiction fans and scientists are eagerly anticipating tomorrow's scheduled launch of NASA's Deep Space 1 mission. But it's not the destination - a close encounter with an obscure asteroid - that excites them. What's special about the mission, which begins a series of flights testing new technologies, is the onboard software that will, for the first time, assume complete control of the spacecraft. |
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A Media Darling Thrives on Publicity In astronomy, where funding can depend on press clips, embargoes and a tradition of rapid communication are sometimes in conflict. |
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Looking South to the Early Universe A flash of news from the Hubble Space Telescope: The distant universe looks about the same in two opposite directions. When the Hubble was aimed at a small patch of northern sky for 10 days in 1995, astronomers believed that their time exposure had captured a typical sliver of the distant universe. But it never hurts to check. |
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Meteor Shower Sets off Scientific Storm The return of comet Tempel-Tuttle has triggered a debate over whether its debris poses a threat to the world's satellites. |
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NASA footage shows asteroid in motion Humankind will have to wait at least another year to see the first closeup views of an asteroid. But in the meantime, NASA has released some unprecedented footage of one of the mysterious space rocks as it rotates slowly in the solitude of space |
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'Closer to God' Ten thousand feet above the Arizona desert, a windswept observatory aims its powerful telescope to the heavens -- an appropriate direction. After all, this observatory is run by the Vatican. |
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From ‘Red’ Station to Green Russia hopes capitalist entrepreneurship will keep the Soviet-era Mir space station in orbit but still has not completed a deal to raise the funds needed to keep it flying. |
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Studying Life in Orbit For the first time in history, humans are making serious plans to carry life to other worlds, but experts said it’s uncertain whether plants and animals from Earth can thrive and evolve on other planets. |
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UK Looks Forward to Next Generation Space Telescope As the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) continues to return a succession of staggering new images and data, astronomers on both sides of the Atlantic are preparing the next giant leap for orbital observatories. Three groups in the UK are playing a leading role in studies to decide which scientific instruments Europe will provide for HST's successor, the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST). |
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Why Worry About the Millennium? We Got It Wrong Much of the world plans to welcome a new millennium on Jan. 1, 2000. But one scientist says that celebration could be a few seconds off, or a year early, or less than a year early - or maybe many years off the mark. |
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Build your own Mars Polar Lander scale model This detailed scale model is a construction project which is probably not appropriate for people younger than about ten years of age, depending on skill and motivation. |
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What ISS Cost of Mir Delays? With Russia wanting to keep Mir in orbit at least another three years, some U.S. scientists wonder if Russia can afford to continue supporting the International Space Station. |
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Gallactic Explosions Inhibit Life SGamma-Ray bursts - incredibly powerful explosions that may be caused by collisions between collapsed stars - could solve one of the oldest riddles about extraterrestrial civilisations: why haven't they reached Earth already? After studying the effects of gamma-ray bursts on life, an astrophysicist has concluded that aliens may have just started to explore their galaxies. |
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New Investigation by UCSD Astronomer Questions the Distance, Cosmological Use of Quasars Since they were discovered more than 35 years ago, science has largely accepted the idea that quasars - since they are thought to be great distances from us - could be used as cosmological tools to study the properties of the universe. Many astronomers have thought of quasars as windows to the history of our expanding universe. Striking new results announced today by Margaret Burbidge, university professor of astronomy in the Physics Department of the University of California, San Diego, show that these conventional views of quasars may not be correct. |
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Tiny galaxies have hearts of darkness Small ghost galaxies, devoid of stars but harboring dense clumps of invisible matter, may outnumber the entire population of luminous galaxies in the universe. |
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Spacecraft may fly on "empty" using propulsive tether concept It's not quite something-for-nothing, but the new International Space Station and other future spaceships may maintain their orbits without using rockets if they follow the lead of an unusual concept selected for a test flight next year. |
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Martian forecast: more mysteries Mars still shows the scars of primeval floods and channels cut billions of years ago when the planet was warmer and wetter. But are there any signs of rain? Geologist Michael Malin, who has studied hundreds of pictures of the Red Planet, sees none of the telltale signs that should be left behind by ancient rainfall. And therein lies a mystery. |
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Martian gorges linked to volcanoes Underground volcanic action on ancient Mars sculpted gorges far larger than the Grand Canyon and melted enough water to feed floods of biblical proportions, two geologists theorize. |
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Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto: Surface comparison at high spatial resolution Images show a comparison of the surfaces of the three icy Galilean satellites Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, scaled to a resolution of 150 meters per picture element. |
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Exploration of Mars Starts at Jeffco The atmosphere at the Waterton Canyon Mission Support Center - the earthbound driver's seat - could hardly be described as routine, but it played out in businesslike fashion as the group guided the start of the second in a string of missions to investigate the Earth's closest neighbor. |
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Mir Staying Up See also: Mir stays in space and Russia to keep Mir station in orbit for three more years Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov signed a decree today to keep the Mir space station in orbit for three more years. |
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Pluto's an Oddball, but Still a Planet Pluto may be an oddball, but it is still a planet. It could, however, get a celestial "social security number" that puts it in league with asteroids and comets, astronomers said Jan. 20. |
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Space Mirror Will Brighten Sky The crew on Russia’s 12-year-old Mir space station plan to unfold a large space mirror next month to reflect light from the sun to the darker corners of Earth. |
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Setback for X-ray Telescope NASA today delayed the launch of its newest and most powerful X-ray telescope by at least five weeks because of flawed circuit boards that need to be replaced. |
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Mars Molded From Below Underground volcanic action on ancient Mars sculpted gorges far larger than the Grand Canyon and melted enough water to feed floods of biblical proportions, two geologists theorize. |
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Up, up, and away to the magnetosphere A space weather rocket blasted off from a launch pad in Norway, early on Jan.19. During its successful 20 minute flight, instruments gathered valuable data on the auroral fountain, where solar wind directly interacts with Earth's atmosphere. |
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Looking for junk in space Onboard the Argos technology demonstration satellite is an instrument designed by University of Chicago scientists to monitor the amount of man-made debris orbiting the Earth. |
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Searching for New Planets Of the 17 planets discovered since 1995 outside our solar system, Geoffrey Marcy of San Francisco State University and the University of California-Berkeley has his name associated with 12. And he didn’t pay the Star Registry a nickel for the privilege. |
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Going after the sparks of creation A NASA spacecraft is to set out next month to grab the sparks thrown off by comets and faraway stars, representing the first mission in 26 years with the goal of retrieving samples from deep space. Scientists hope the tiny particles returned by the Stardust probe will help answer huge questions about life and the cosmos. |
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Pluto may be demoted See also: Pluto May Get Demoted In just a few weeks time tiny Pluto will regain its crown as the most distant planet orbiting the Sun. Soon afterwards however it may lose its planetary status forever. |
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Russia clears next Mir crew for launch Russian space doctors have cleared the next crew to fly to the Mir space station. |
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Out of this World to Another NASA is currently developing a telescope that will be able to pick out Earth-like planets around nearby stars. One person on the project wondered what we should do if we found such a planet. So he designed a spaceship to take us there. |
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Super-camera takes powerful new images of space A new camera with 67 million photo-sensors or pixels is giving astronomers unparalleled views of the universe. Mounted on a telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, the Wide Field Imager (WFI) enables those studying the skies detailed views of far away stars, galaxies and the like. |
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1 Hectare Telescope The SETI Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, have recently signed a memorandum of understanding that could result in the construction of a world-class telescope array. |
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Astrophysicists puzzle over intergalactic coincidence Coincidences are rare in nature, so when one occurs, the natural reaction is to see if the two events are linked by more than just chance, and if that link applies elsewhere in the universe. Thus, some astrophysicists started to rethink the non-linkage between gamma-ray bursts and supernovae after an event in April 1998. |
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Astrophysicists Announce Superwinds Discovery Superwinds a hundred million light years long have helped to sculpture the universe, astrophysicists have announced. Although most people think of space as empty, it does, in fact, contain highly dilute gases. These gases, moving at incredible speeds, constitute the superwinds. They can span distances equal to about 1 percent of the size of the observable universe. |
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Cassini should be back to normal soon NASA's Cassini spacecraft should be restored to normal working order in a few days after the Saturn-bound probe shut down all but critical systems earlier this week. |
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X-ray concentrator will expand window on high-energy universe Funneling X-rays through microscopic glass tubes promises to give astronomers a sharper view of the energetic activities deep in space - and a better understanding of the chemical structure of life. |
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The coldest place in the Universe As a famous coastal resort, Brighton, south of London, might not be too keen to be known as the coldest place not just on earth but in the entire universe. |
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Pick a galaxy Anyone can vote for the Hubble Space Telescope to point at a galaxy of their choice, thanks to an initiative by the Hubble Heritage Project. |
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Where’s Cassini Headed? See also: Saturn-bound Cassini develops problem The plutonium-powered Cassini spacecraft went into a safe mode this week when it detected a possible error in its orientation en route to Saturn. |
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Japan’s Mars Probe Delayed Japan’s first spacecraft to Mars will reach its destination in late 2003, four years later than initially planned because of a fuel shortage. |
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Is Cosmology Solved? Cosmologist Michael S. Turner has put forth an assertion that for the first time in history, cosmologists have developed a consistent framework that integrates the origin, evolution, and current appearance of the universe. |
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NASA aims to collect a scoopful of stardust The Stardust project will send a spacecraft flying through the cloud of dust that surrounds the nucleus of a comet -- and, for the first time ever, bring cometary material back to Earth. |
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NASA Puts Its Hi-Tech Ear Up To the Red Planet Imagine going to a desert that is completely vacant, and listening. At first it may sound eerily quiet, but eventually, subtle noises like wind blowing over sand or distant weather systems would become more noticeable. Now imagine you're 120 million miles from Earth. |
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Re-creating Mars on Earth NASA is sending a series of robotic probes to Mars over the next decade, but the Mars Society hopes to do similar research right on our home planet. The international group of space enthusiasts is planning to build a simulated Mars station on Canada’s barren Devon Island. |
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Mars Global Surveyor Zooms In On Mars Mars Global Surveyor has begun the second phase of aerobraking, after spending the spring and summer in an elliptical, 11.6-hour orbit to allow Mars to move into the proper position for the start of the mapping mission in March 1999. |
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Experts Estimate 125 Billion Galaxies in Universe Looking back in time at a tiny section of sky, the Hubble Space Telescope found there may be 125 billion galaxies in the universe, about 45 billion more than the last best estimate. |
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Supercluster of Galaxies May Be Larger than once Believed The largest structure in the universe is a supercluster of thousands of galaxies that may stretch for up to a billion light-years across the heavens, astronomers report. |
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Hubble Observations Lead to Increase in Galaxy Estimate A long look deep into space by the Hubble Space Telescope has led astronomers to increase their estimate of the total number of galaxies in the universe. |
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A bubble-blowing black hole See also: Hubble captures new portrait of a doomed star A black hole at the heart of a giant galaxy is blowing bubbles into space. |
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A year at the moon: Lunar Prospector continues mission of discovery NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft, designed and built at Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space in Sunnyvale, has marked one year in orbit around the moon and continues to provide high quality data to scientists. |
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Combined Deep View of Infrared and Visible Light Galaxies A narrow, deep view of the universe reveals a plethora of galaxies (reaching fainter than 28th magnitude), as seen in visible and infrared light by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. |
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Looking Down a Barrel of Gas at a Doomed Star The NASA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the sharpest view yet of the most famous of all planetary nebulae: the Ring Nebula (M57). |
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Meteors by Moonlight The first major meteor shower of 1999 has come and gone, largely hidden from view by the light of last week's full moon. Early reports stretching from the Middle East to eastern North America indicate that 15 to 30 meteors per hour were visible in clear-sky locations. |
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Starquake Thank your lucky stars that a magnetar--a new type of star astronomers discovered earlier this year--lies 20,000 light years from Earth. If the star strayed any closer than the moon, force of its magnetic field could suck the keys out of your pocket and might rip iron atoms right out of your blood. |
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Star Motions Yield Four More Planets The hunt for planets outside our solar system continues to show results. The latest findings include a nearby, sunlike star that may have two companions: a planet and a heavier object, known as a brown dwarf. | |
Global Surveyor Maps Mars' Northern Ice Using the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which has orbited the Red Planet for only a year, scientists have become extraordinarily familiar with the most northern parts of Mars and have generated the first accurate, three-dimensional map of the area. |
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X-Ray Observatory Calls it Quits After an 8-year mission in which it generated an X-ray map of the entire sky and recorded high-energy radiation from objects as far away as quasars and as close as the moon and comets, the German-British-U.S. satellite ROSAT has closed up shop. |
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Kuiper Belt Object Shows Hint of Activity European consortium Arianespace is in talks with the Russian space agency about using its Kourou base in French Guiana for launching Soyuz rockets. |
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Russian rockets may be launched from South America European consortium Arianespace is in talks with the Russian space agency about using its Kourou base in French Guiana for launching Soyuz rockets. |
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Superflares Can Zap Planets Some sun-like stars burst forth with flares that would melt the ice on Saturn’s moons. Fortunately for us, that probably won’t happen with our sun. |
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Light’s On, But No Stars See also: Astronomers Chase New Theory of Darkness-Shrouded 'Ghost Galaxies' A halo around a spiral galaxy should have hundreds, even thousands of stars. Astronomers found just one. So whatever’s causing the halo certainly isn’t normal stars. |
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Crashing Into Mars Here’s the essence of NASA’s Deep Space 2 project: stuff a basketball-size container with electronics and other equipment, blast it into the ground at 400 mph, and have it still work. |
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NEAR Adjusts Course NASA engineers made a 24-minute firing of a spacecraft’s engines Sunday to put the probe in line to reach the asteroid 433 Eros by early next year. |
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Major engine burn completed by NEAR spacecraft At noon, EST, January 3, the NEAR mission team conducted a 24-minute, large bipropellant engine burn, to increase the spacecraft's speed for a rendezvous with Eros in February 2000. |
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To the Martian Pole See also: Mars mission beats the weather, Mars lander sets off to break new ground and Mars Polar Lander begins trek to the Red Planet Mars Polar Lander, NASA’s next mission to the Red Planet, lifted off 3:21 pm EST Sunday afternoon. It will be the first spacecraft to visit the polar region of another planet. |
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New investor to keep Mir afloat A senior official with the Russian space industry has said that an international investor is prepared to fund the continued use of the Mir space station. The station was due to be abandoned later this year. |
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NASA seeking names for two soil-penetrating probes NASA is holding a contest to name the twin soil-penetrating probes to be launched Jan. 3 aboard the Mars Polar Lander. |
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Full Moon Fever When the full moon takes its place in Friday (01/01/1999) night’s cold winter sky it will begin an unusual series of full moons not seen in more than eight decades. |
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A Look into the Heavens The most powerful telescope in the solar system reaches across galaxies and time to record some stunning views of the universe. Click here to view some 1998 photos from the Hubble Space Telescope. |
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Space: The final holiday destination Bored with the beach? Find ski-ing an uphill struggle? Worry no more, for in just a few years' time the ultimate vacation could be yours with a two-week trip into space. |
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Mars lander set for Sunday launch See also: Mars lander will be breaking new ground NASA's first Mars lander in two years is poised for liftoff Sunday on an 11-month voyage to the red planet. Unlike the preceding Pathfinder mission, which featured a robotic rover, the Mars Polar Lander will be stationary. But it will carry along something never before used on a space probe: a microphone for listening for sounds on the Martian surface. |
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Mir crew sends space snapshots Russia’s Mir space station is beaming down pictures to amateur radio operators around the world, thanks to a two-way system built by American enthusiasts without a cent from the government. A similar setup could be used to transmit live video from the International Space Station, says one of the effort’s organizers. |
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Close-up of Eros Pictures of only the third asteroid to be imaged from close-up have been sent back to Earth by the unfortunate Near spacecraft. |
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Near the brink of recovery Following its recent problems mission controllers have announced that the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (Near) spacecraft will not enter orbit around the asteroid Eros until May 2000 instead of January 1999. |
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Stars in Neighboring Galaxy, Clues to Dark Matter A binary star system in a nearby galaxy may bring astronomers closer to understanding the nature of dark matter, according to Ohio State University researchers. |
