European Association for Astronomy Education

Source: NASA-Solar System Exploration

New data analysis from NASA's Galileo spacecraft reveals a subsurface ocean of molten or partially molten magma beneath the surface of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io.

The finding heralds the first direct confirmation of this kind of magma layer at Io and explains why the moon is the most volcanic object known in the solar system. The research was conducted by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Michigan.

The study is published this week in the journal Science. (read more)

Source: NASA-Dawn

Image processed to show the true size of the giant asteroid Vesta.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.

Dawn spacecraft has obtained its first image of the giant asteroid Vesta, which will help fine-tune navigation during its approach. Dawn expects to achieve orbit around Vesta on July 16, when the asteroid is about 117 million miles from Earth.

The image from Dawn's framing cameras was taken on May 3 when the spacecraft began its approach and was approximately 752,000 miles (1.21 million km) from Vesta. The asteroid appears as a small, bright pearl against a background of stars. Vesta also is known as a protoplanet, because it is a large body that almost formed into a planet. (read more)

Source: ESA

Beluga transporter. Image credits: NASA/Jim Grossmann

Pau Pyrénées in southern France has become Europe’s first airport to use the new EGNOS Safety-of-Life Service, to guide aircraft in for landing using only this highly accurate space navigation signal. (read more)

Source: NASA News

Artist concept of Gravity Probe B spacecraft in orbit around the Earth.Image Credit: Stanford

NASA's Gravity Probe B (GP-B) mission has confirmed two key predictions derived from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which the spacecraft was designed to test.

The experiment, launched in 2004, used four ultra-precise gyroscopes to measure the hypothesized geodetic effect, the warping of space and time around a gravitational body, and frame-dragging, the amount a spinning object pulls space and time with it as it rotates.

GP-B determined both effects with unprecedented precision by pointing at a single star, IM Pegasi, while in a polar orbit around Earth. If gravity did not affect space and time, GP-B's gyroscopes would point in the same direction forever while in orbit. But in confirmation of Einstein's theories, the gyroscopes experienced measurable, minute changes in the direction of their spin, while Earth's gravity pulled at them.

The findings are online in the journal Physical Review Letters. (read more)

Other Links:
NASA Science News

Source: NASA News

Dawn spacecraft, illustrated in this artist's concept, is propelled by ion engines.
Image credit: NASA/JPL.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has reached its official approach phase to the asteroid Vesta and will begin using cameras for the first time to aid navigation for an expected July 16 orbital encounter. The large asteroid is known as a protoplanet - a celestial body that almost formed into a planet.

At the start of this three-month final approach to this massive body in the asteroid belt, Dawn is 752,000 miles (1.21 million kilometers) from Vesta, or about three times the distance between the Earth and the moon. During the approach phase, the spacecraft's main activity will be thrusting with a special, hyper-efficient ion engine that uses electricity to ionize and accelerate xenon to generate thrust. The 12-inch-wide ion thrusters provide less thrust than conventional engines, but will provide propulsion for years during the mission and provide far greater capability to change velocity. (read more)

Source: NASA Science News

The Golden Record. Image credit: NASA.

NASA's Voyager probes are at the edge of the solar system carrying a message to possible extraterrestrial civilizations.  Highlights include greetings from humans and whales, some of Earth's greatest music, and the brainwaves of a young woman in love. (read more)

Source: ESA EuroNews

Source: ESA News

Last night, an Ariane 5 launcher lifted off from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on its mission to place two telecommunications satellites, Yahsat Y1A and Intelsat New Dawn, into their planned transfer orbits. Flight VA201 was the second Ariane 5 launch of 2011. (read more)

Source: NASA News

Graphic image of Shell Buckling Knockdown Factor Test. Credits: NASA

NASA put the squeeze on a large rocket test section today. Results from this structural strength test at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., will help future heavy-lift launch vehicles weigh less and reduce development costs.

This trailblazing project is examining the safety margins needed in the design of future, large launch vehicle structures. Test results will be used to develop and validate structural analysis models and generate new "shell-buckling knockdown factors" -- complex engineering design standards essential to launch vehicle design. (read more)

Source: Messenger Mission

On March 17th, MESSENGER Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., received the anticipated radiometric signals confirming nominal burn shutdown and successful insertion of the MESSENGER probe into orbit around the planet Mercury.

The spacecraft rotated back to the Earth and started transmitting data.  Upon review of these data, the engineering and operations teams confirmed that the burn executed nominally with all subsystems reporting a clean burn and no logged errors.

MESSENGER’s main thruster fired for approximately 15 minutes  slowing the spacecraft by 1,929 miles per hour (862 meters per second) and easing it into the planned eccentric orbit about Mercury. The rendezvous took place about 96 million miles (155 million kilometers) from Earth.

Source: ESA

Alphabus has met Alphasat. Europe's largest telecom satellite is taking shape with final assembly and testing ready to begin in Toulouse, France.  Planned for launch in late 2012 on Ariane 5, Alphasat will provide advanced mobile communication links for commercial operator Inmarsat.(read more)

Source: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

Area of about 460 meters across, in which carbonate minerals
have been identified from spectrometer observations.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Rocks on Mars dug from far underground by crater-blasting impacts are providing glimpses of one possible way Mars' atmosphere has become much less dense than it used to be.

At several places where cratering has exposed material from depths of about 5 kilometers (3 miles) or more beneath the surface, observations by a mineral-mapping instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate carbonate minerals.

These are not the first detections of carbonates on Mars. However, compared to earlier findings, they bear closer resemblance to what some scientists have theorized for decades about the whereabouts of Mars' "missing" carbon. If deeply buried carbonate layers are found to be widespread, they would help answer questions about the disappearance of most of ancient Mars' atmosphere, which is deduced to have been thick and mostly carbon dioxide. The carbon that goes into formation of carbonate minerals can come from atmospheric carbon dioxide. (read more)

Source: NASA News

NASA will host a media teleconference to discuss the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury.

NASA's MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging, or MESSENGER, will enter orbit at approximately 9 p.m. EDT on Thursday, March 17. The spacecraft has conducted more than a dozen laps through the inner solar system for nearly 7 years.

Media teleconference participants are:
-- Andy Calloway, MESSENGER mission operations manager, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md.
-- Carl Engelbrecht, MESSENGER propulsion subsystem lead, APL
-- Sean Solomon, MESSENGER principal investigator, Carnegie Institution of Washington

Source: ESA

LISA will comprise three satellites, linked by lasers across five million km of
space, to track very slight spacetime distortion caused by gravitational waves.
Image credits: AEI/MildeMarketing/Exozet.

A key technical challenge of the joint ESA-NASA LISA mission has been solved: how to maintain precise pointing of a laser beam across five million km of space.(read more)

Source: ESA

The Rosetta orbiter swoops over the lander soon after touchdown on the
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.Image credits: Astrium - E. Viktor.

Ultra-light carbon-fibre rods used to stiffen a comet probe’s legs are now being harnessed by a German manufacturer to boost the precision and efficiency of their laser cutters.(read more)

Source: ESA

Artist's impression of GOCE in its orbit.
Credits: ESA /AOES Medialab

ESA's GOCE satellite has reached its ambitious goal of mapping Earth's gravity with unprecedented precision. In two short years, the sophisticated satellite has collected the measurements needed to record the 'geoid' reference shape of our planet.(read more)

Source: NASA/Glory

The launch of NASA's Glory spacecraft from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is currently planned for no earlier than Friday, Feb. 25 at 5:09 a.m. EST. Engineers from NASA and Orbital Sciences Corp. continue to troubleshoot a technical issue that arose during Wednesday's initial launch attempt. The target launch date also will ensure personnel get the required rest before entering another countdown.

The Glory satellite is being launched aboard an Orbital Sciences Taurus XL rocket on a mission to improve our understanding of how the sun and tiny atmospheric particles called aerosols affect Earth's climate.(read source)

Credit: Universe Today

Artist's conception of Milky Way, showing locations of star-forming regions whose distances were recently measured.
Image credit: M. Reid, Harvard-Smithsonian CfA; R. Hurt, SSC/JPL/Caltech, NRAO/AUI/NSF,Kitt Peak.

Los Alamos. St. Croix. Pie Town.

What do these places have in common? They each house one of 10 giant telescopes in the Very Large Baseline Array, a continent-spanning collection of telescopes that’s flexing its optical muscles, reaching farther into space — with more precision — than any other telescope in the world.

And yesterday, at the 177th annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC, VLBA researchers announced an amazing feat: They’ve used the VLBA to peer, with stunning accuracy, three times as far into the universe as they had just two years ago. New measurements with the VLBA have placed a galaxy called NGC 6264 (coordinates below) at a distance of 450 million light-years from Earth, with an uncertainty of no more than 9 percent. This is the farthest distance ever directly measured, surpassing a measurement of 160 million light-years to another galaxy in 2009.(read more)

Source: NASA/Messenger

Solar System Family Portrait from the inside out. Image credit: NASA/John Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

The MESSENGER spacecraft has captured the first portrait of our Solar System from the inside looking out. Comprised of 34 images, the mosaic provides a complement to the Solar System portrait – that one from the outside looking in – taken by Voyager 1 in 1990.

“Obtaining this portrait was a terrific feat by the MESSENGER team,” says MESSENGER Principal Investigator Sean Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “This snapshot of our neighborhood also reminds us that Earth is a member of a planetary family that was formed by common processes four and a half billion years ago. Our spacecraft is soon to orbit the innermost member of the family, one that holds many new answers to how Earth-like planets are assembled and evolve.”

MESSENGER’s Wide Angle Camera (WAC) captured the images on November 3 and 16, 2010. In the mosaic, all of the planets are visible except for Uranus and Neptune, which – at distances of 3.0 and 4.4 billion kilometers – were too faint to detect. Earth’s Moon and Jupiter’s Galilean satellites (Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, and Io) can be seen in the NAC image insets. The Solar System’s perch on a spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy also afforded a beautiful view of a portion of the galaxy in the bottom center.

“The curved shape of the mosaic is due to the inclination of MESSENGER’s orbit from the ecliptic, the plane in which Earth and most planets orbit, which means that the cameras must point up to see some planets and down to see others,” explains MESSENGER imaging team member Brett Denevi of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md. “ The images are stretched to make it easier to detect the planets, though this stretch also highlights light scattered off of the planet limbs, and in some cases creates artifacts such as the non-spherical shape of some planets.”(read more)

Source: ESA PR072011

Artist's Impression of the ATV Johannes Kepler.
Image credit: ESA - D. Ducros, 2010.

Europe's ATV Johannes Kepler supply ship on its way to Space Station

ESA's second Automated Transfer Vehicle, Johannes Kepler, has been launched into its targeted low orbit by an Ariane 5. The unmanned supply ship is planned to deliver critical supplies and reboost the International Space Station during its almost four-month mission.

The Ariane 5 lifted off from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, at 21:50 GMT (18:50 local) on Wednesday 16 February.(read more)