Source: Science@NASA
Hayabusa photographs its own shadow on asteroid Itokawa in 2005.
Image credit: ISAS, JAXA
The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa spacecraft returned to Earth with tiny pieces of asteroid Itokawa. In today's article from Science@NASA, a NASA specialist on the Hayabusa science team describes the nail-biting sample return and hints at new results from the ongoing analysis. (read more)
Source: ESA
2010 has been another great year for ESA with achievements in different areas, including Earth observation, science, human spaceflight and telecommunications. From the launch of Cryosat to the Planck sky scan, from Node-3 with Cupola completing the International Space Station to Paolo Nespoli launched on Soyuz to the ISS, from the Rosetta flyby of asteroid Lutetia to the launch of Hylas providing broadband for Europe. (see source)
EAAE News in behalf of EAAE's Executive Council wishes all subscribers and readers a Happy New Year 2011.
Clear Skies.
Source: NASA News Release 10-347
NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless during a space walk.
Image credit: NASA/JPL.
NASA is seeking applications from graduate students for the agency's new Space Technology Research Fellowships. Applications are being accepted from accredited U.S. universities on behalf of graduate students interested in performing space technology research beginning in the fall of 2011.
The fellowships will sponsor U.S. graduate student researchers who show significant potential to contribute to NASA's strategic space technology objectives through their studies. Sponsored by NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist, the fellowships' goal is to provide the nation with a pipeline of highly skilled engineers and technologists to improve America's technological competitiveness. NASA Space Technology Fellows will perform innovative space technology research today while building the skills necessary to become future technological leaders.
"Our Space Technology Graduate Fellowships will help create the pool of highly skilled workers needed for NASA's and our nation's technological future, motivating many of the country's best young minds into educational programs and careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics," said NASA Chief Technologist Bobby Braun at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "This fellowship program is coupled to a larger, national research and development effort in science and technology that will lead to new products and services, new business and industries, and high-quality, sustainable jobs. Fellowships will be awarded to outstanding young researchers and technologists positioned to take on NASA's grand challenges and turn these goals and missions into reality."
The deadline for submitting fellowship proposals is Feb. 23. Information on the fellowships, including how to submit applications, is available at:
Source: NASA Home
SOHO's 2000th comet, spotted by a Polish amateur astronomer on December 26, 2010.
Image Credit: SOHO/Karl Battams
As people on Earth celebrate the holidays and prepare to ring in the New Year, an ESA/NASA spacecraft has quietly reached its own milestone: on December 26, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) discovered its 2000th comet.
Drawing on help from citizen scientists around the world, SOHO has become the single greatest comet finder of all time. This is all the more impressive since SOHO was not specifically designed to find comets, but to monitor the sun.(read more)
Source: NASA Home Image Release
Image credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity gained this view during the 2,459th Martian day, or sol of the rover's work on Mars (Dec. 24, 2010) from the edge of a football-field-size crater informally named "Santa Maria."
This view is the right-eye member of a stereo pair from Opportunity's front hazard-avoidance camera.
The rover's upraised robotic arm, itself out of view, casts a dragon-shaped shadow in the foreground.
Opportunity's viewpoint for this scene is the position reached by a drive on Sol 2454. Drives on sols 2452 and 2454 brought Opportunity a few meters counterclockwise around the western side of the crater from the place where the rover first approached the crater on Sol 2451 (Dec. 16, 2010).
Sources: SPA announcement by Teresa Lago and follow up by ESO Release eso1050
The Extraordinary ESO Council Meeting held last week (by teleconference) the ESO Council has authorized the Director General of ESO to sign the Accession Agreement with Brazil to become the 15th ESO Member State and the 1st out of Europe (Chile is not a member despite the formal relations due to the location of ESO's major facilities). This is naturally particularly interesting for Portugal as a Member State since Portugal and Brasil have a long lasting cooperation tradition. The Accession is due to take place from 2011 since the Accession Agreement was assigned today.
Furthermore Brazil financial contribution (entrance fee + annual contribution) is decisive for the funding scenario for the E-ELT.
Source: ESA
ESA’s GIOVE-A satellite – the first prototype of Europe’s Galileo satellite navigation system – is still working well after five years in space.
The first ‘Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element’, GIOVE-A, was launched on 28 December 2005 by a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, carrying a prototype rubidium atomic clock designed for the Galileo constellation.(read more)
It was joined on 27 April 2008 by GIOVE-B, equipped with an ultra-precise passive hydrogen maser design as well as a second rubidium clock. Operational Galileo satellites will carry both clock designs for maximum reliability.
Source: ESA/ESTEC/SOHO
The SOHO team has released a composite image of the Sun that reveales several layers of the star that heats our planet.
One can virtually peer through layers of the Sun to see different kinds of features using images taken at almost the same time (Dec. 19, 2010). Each STEREO spacecraft images the Sun in four wavelengths of extreme UV light.
People cannot see UV light, but carefully designed instruments can. Frames from each wavelength are colorized so that scientists know instantly which wavelength they are observing. And each wavelength is imaging different material at different layers and temperatures.
By superimposing images on top of one another, and moving from the just above the Sun to further out in the Sun's outer atmosphere, we can illustrate how different features are revealed.
Source: NASA/Chandra (Image Release)
SNR 0509-67.5
Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.Hughes et al.
Optical: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
This colorful creation was made by combining data from two of NASA's Great Observatories. Optical data of SNR 0509-67.5 and its accompanying star field, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, are composited with X-ray energies from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The result shows soft green and blue hues of heated material from the X-ray data surrounded by the glowing pink optical shell which shows the ambient gas being shocked by the expanding blast wave from the supernova. Ripples in the shell's appearance coincide with brighter areas of the X-ray data.
The Type 1a supernova that resulted in the creation of SNR 0509-67.5 occurred nearly 400 years ago for Earth viewers. The supernova remnant, and its progenitor star reside in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small galaxy about 160,000 light-years from Earth. The bubble-shaped shroud of gas is 23 light-years across and is expanding at more than 11 million miles per hour (5,000 kilometers per second).
Data from Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, taken in 2006 with a filter that isolates light from glowing hydrogen were combined with visible-light images of the surrounding star field that were imaged with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 in 2010. These data were then merged with X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory taken with the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) in 2000 and 2007.
Source: NASA/Chandra
Composite images of galaxies Abell 644, left, and galaxy SDSS J1021+131.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Northwestern Univ/D.Haggard et al. Optical: SDSS
A new study from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory tells scientists how often the biggest black holes have been active over the last few billion years. This discovery clarifies how supermassive black holes grow and could have implications for how the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way will behave in the future.
Most galaxies, including our own, are thought to contain supermassive black holes at their centers, with masses ranging from millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. For reasons not entirely understood, astronomers have found that these black holes exhibit a wide variety of activity levels: from dormant to just lethargic to practically hyper.
The most lively supermassive black holes produce what are called "active galactic nuclei," or AGN, by pulling in large quantities of gas. This gas is heated as it falls in and glows brightly in X-ray light. (read more)
Source: ESA Observing Earth
ESA’s 2009 global land cover map has been released and is now available to the public online from the ‘GlobCover’ website. GlobCover 2009 proves the sharpest possible global land cover map can be created within a year.(read more)
Source: NASA/John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
10 years ago, on Dec. 19, 2000, NASA announced that it would conduct a competition for a PI-led mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.
The New Horizons science team at Kennedy Space Center in November 2005, two months before launch.
Image credit: John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
Within a week of NASA's announcement, some scientists from NASA and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory formed a mission team, which ultimately became known as New Horizons mission that would develop the probe that has the same name.
As we enter the 2010 holiday season, New Horizons is rapidly approaching the orbit of Uranus, which it will cross on March 18, 2011 - the same day the MESSENGER mission enters orbit about Mercury.
New Horizons is rapidly approaching the orbit of Uranus.
Image credit: John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
The mission still has more than 4 years to go to get to Pluto, and another nine months after that to get all the data back on Earth. Neptune orbit crossing will happen in August 2014. And then - in 2015 - the first encounter of New Horizons with the Pluto system, visiting Pluto, Charon, Nix and Hydra, and very likely after that a KBO or two as well.(read more)
A partial solar eclipse
After almost all Europe missed the Total Lunar Eclipse on December 21st, 2010, European teachers have new chance on the first Tuesday of next year. On January 4th, 2011, a partial eclipse of the Sun will be widely visible across Europe and as far east as India (view the following NASA's animation to see the areas where the eclipse will be most visible).
Animation of the solar eclipse. Image credit: NASA/GSFC
A partial solar eclipse occurs in the polar regions of the Earth when the center of the moon's shadow misses the Earth.
Solar eclipse map of path on earth. Image credit: NASA/GSFC
Once again project Moonwalkers will make a follow-up of this eclipse and will upload on the website all works that are sent to the archive's email (eaae.moon@gmail.com).
Source: NASA/Cassini News
Raw image of Saturn's moon Dione taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI
On the heels of a successful close flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus, NASA's Cassini spacecraft is returning images of Enceladus and the nearby moon Dione.
The Enceladus flyby took Cassini within about 48 kilometers (30 miles) of the moon's northern hemisphere. Cassini also swung past Dione at a distance of about 100,000 kilometers and captured intriguing images of the bright, fractured region known as the "wispy terrain. (read more)
For almost four centuries a total lunar eclipse hasn't coincided with the December solstice, called the Winter Solstice in Northern Hemisphere and Summer Solstice in Southern Hemisphere. If weather conditions allowed a clear view of the sky Western Europe could see the first stages of the eclipse before moonset. On the rest of the world people from North America, Greenland and Iceland could see the entire event, and western Asia and Australia got the end of the eclipse after moonrise.
Many beautiful images were posted on the Internet by many lucky astronomers that had the weather cooperating with them.
In the majority of European countries where there was a possibilty of seeing the eclipse the bad weather made it impossible to be seen. This was my case. As shown bellow in Faro, Algarve, Portugal, where it usually never rains, the climate has gone mad and it as been raining a lot during the hole last week and this week also. So it was very cloudy at the time the eclipse might have been seen.
Luckily, this was not general. Some images can already be found on the internet about the event in Europe. For instance Stu Atkinson has described his experience viewing this eclipse in the UK on his blog.
Lunar Eclipse seen from Kendal Castle, Cumbria, UK. Image credit: Stu Atkinson/Cumbrian Sky.
The EAAE wishes our members, readers and all their beloved ones a Merry Christmas.
Source: ESA General
ESA's 2009 global land cover map has been released and is now available to the public online from the ‘GlobCover’ website. GlobCover 2009 proves the sharpest possible global land cover map can be created within a year.(read more)
Source: IAU
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has revealed today that the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) Secretariat will finish its activities on 31 December 2010, following three and a half years of service. While closure of the IYA2009 Secretariat marks the end of the largest project that the IAU has ever embarked upon, the organisation remains committed to promoting education and public outreach throughout the world.(read more)
Source: NASA/Kepler
Artist's impression about the Kepler mission. Image credit: NASA.
During a regularly scheduled contact with the Kepler spacecraft on Dec. 13, 2010, the project team discovered Kepler had experienced an anomaly. Kepler was found in coarse point attitude, as opposed to finepoint. Coarse point means the Kepler is using its star trackers for pointing at the Kepler Field-of-View (FOV) instead of the fine guidance sensors that are hard-mounted to the Kepler focal plane array. To properly track Kepler’s target stars with fine accuracy, Kepler must be in finepoint attitude.
Project engineers began analysis of the situation to determine the cause of the anomaly. They determined that Kepler failed to transition properly from coarse point to finepoint attitude after a pre-planned momentum wheel de-saturation. Momentum wheel de-saturations occur on a regular basis for the spacecraft, approximately every three-and-one-half days. The de-saturation uses thrusters to dump momentum buildup on Kepler’s reaction wheels, which spin continuously to counter the solar wind, which pushes on the spacecraft body as Kepler points at its FOV.
The project team was able to recover the spacecraft to finepoint relatively quickly. Only 13 hours of science data collection were interrupted by this anomaly. The team will continue to evaluate telemetry from the event to confirm the root cause, and develop any further mitigations. The Kepler mission budgets for interruptions in the mission, including scheduled maintenance on the spacecraft and anomalies such as this. The mission remains well within the budget outages allowed.
Meanwhile, the project science team is preparing for Kepler-related sessions at the upcoming American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle in early January. The Science Team also is preparing for the planned Feb. 1, 2011 release of Quarter 2 data and release of sequestered target data from Quarter 0 and Quarter 1.
