European Association for Astronomy Education

Source: Brown University

A research team led by Brown University has documented dozens of channels carved by melted water from glaciers located in the midlatitude region of Mars. The glaciofluvial valleys were carved in Mars’ most recent epoch, the team reports, supporting the idea that the Red Planet was home to diverse watery environments in its recent past. Results are published in Icarus. (read more)

Source: Royal Astronomical Society

Many of the Milky Way’s ancient stars are remnants of other smaller galaxies torn apart by violent galactic collisions around five billion years ago, according to researchers at Durham University, who publish their results in a new paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. (read more)

Source: ESA

Proba-2 is a small but innovative member of ESA’s spacecraft fleet, crammed with experimental technologies. In its first eight months of life it has already returned more than 90 000 images of the Sun.(read more)

Source: ESA

The SCIAMACHY sensor on ESA’s Envisat satellite has provided scientists with invaluable data on our planet, allowing them to map global air pollution and the distribution of greenhouse gases. (read more)

Credit: ESA/HST

A spectacular new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image — one of the largest ever released of a star-forming region — highlights N11, part of a complex network of gas clouds and star clusters within our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. This region of energetic star formation is one of the most active in the nearby Universe.(read more)

Source: PHYSORG

A team of scientists from the Instituto Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of Texas has succeeded in identifying one of the most complex organic molecules yet found in the material between the stars, the so-called interstellar medium. The discovery of anthracene could help resolve a decades-old astrophysical mystery concerning the production of organic molecules in space. The researchers report their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.(read more)

Source: ESA

ESA’s comet-chaser Rosetta is heading for a blind date with asteroid Lutetia. Rosetta does not yet know what Lutetia looks like but beautiful or otherwise the two will meet on 10 July. (read more)

Source: University of Colorado at Boulder

A vast ocean likely covered one-third of the surface of Mars some 3.5 billion years ago, according to a new study conducted by University of Colorado at Boulder scientists.

The CU-Boulder study is the first to combine the analysis of water-related features including scores of delta deposits and thousands of river valleys to test for the occurrence of an ocean sustained by a global hydrosphere on early Mars. While the notion of a large, ancient ocean on Mars has been repeatedly proposed and challenged over the past two decades, the new study provides further support for the idea of a sustained sea on the Red Planet during the Noachian era more than 3 billion years ago, said CU-Boulder researcher Gaetano Di Achille, lead author on the study.

A paper on the subject authored by Di Achille and CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Brian Hynek of the geological sciences department appears in the June 13 issue of Nature Geoscience. Both Di Achille and Hynek are affiliated with CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

More than half of the 52 river delta deposits identified by the CU researchers in the new study — each of which was fed by numerous river valleys — likely marked the boundaries of the proposed ocean, since all were at about the same elevation. The research team says twenty-nine of the 52 deltas were connected either to the ancient Mars ocean or to the groundwater table of the ocean and to several large, adjacent lakes. (read more)

Source: ESA

As the ISS circles Earth, it has begun tracking individual ships crossing the seas beneath. An experiment hosted by ESA’s Columbus module is testing the viability of monitoring global traffic from the Station’s orbit hundreds of kilometres up.(read more)

Source: AFP

Scientists in Australia’s vast Outback on Monday recovered a capsule of the Hyabusa mission that they hope contains the first piece of asteroid ever brought to Earth — perhaps offering a glimpse into ancient space history.

The pod was ejected from a Japanese space probe as the host vessel burned up in a spectacular display over Australia following a seven-year odyssey across the solar system to the far-off Itokawa asteroid.

It lay in the desert dust overnight before scientists were given the go-ahead to retrieve it after Aboriginal elders said it had not landed in any indigenous sacred sites. (read more)

Source: NASA /JPL

This test of the radar system to be used during the August 2012 descent and landing of the NASA Mars rover Curiosity mounted an engineering test model of the radar system onto the nose of a helicopter. Image Credit: NASA

Engineers with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are running diverse trials with a test version of the radar system that will enable NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission to put the Curiosity rover onto the Martian surface in August 2012.

One set of tests conducted over a desert lakebed at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., in May 2010 used flights with a helicopter simulating specific descent paths anticipated for Martian sites.

During the final stage of descent, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission will use a “sky crane” maneuver to lower Curiosity on a bridle from the mission’s rocket-powered descent stage. The descent stage will carry Curiosity’s flight radar.

The testing at Dryden included lowering a rover mockup on a tether from the helicopter to assess how the sky crane maneuver will affect the radar’s descent-speed determinations by the radar. The helicopter carried the test radar on a special nose-mounted gimbal.

Helicopter-flown testing has also been conducted at other desert locations for experience in an assortment of terrains. Later in 2010, the team plans to test the higher-altitude, higher-velocity part of Curiosity’s radar-aided descent by flying the test radar on dives by an F/A-18 jet from Dryden.

Source: ESO

Astronomers often turn their telescopes to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the closest galaxies to our own Milky Way, in their quest to understand the Universe. In this spectacular new image from the Wide Field Imager (WFI) at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, a celestial menagerie of different objects and phenomena in part of the LMC is on display, ranging from vast globular clusters to the remains left by brilliant supernovae explosions. This fascinating observation provides data for a wide variety of research projects unravelling the life and death of stars and the evolution of galaxies. (read more)

Source: ESA

ESA has now opened the possibility of people to try to suggest a name for next mission to the ISS. An oportunity not to loose.

ESA’s promotion slogan is “ESA’s Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli will soon visit the International Space Station, and he needs your help to name his mission.” (read more)