European Association for Astronomy Education

Source: ESA

The International Space Station with ATV-2 and Endeavour.
Image credits: ESA/NASA.

For more than a decade, the International Space Station has been a busy orbiting research lab. But it could soon take on a new role as a testbed for ambitious missions deeper into space.

Future ventures could include Mars missions, lunar habitats or travelling to an asteroid – all needing new technologies and techniques that could be tested on the Station. Following yesterday's meeting of the orbital outpost's Multilateral Coordination Board, member agencies expect to begin identifying specific technology initiatives based on sample exploration missions.(read more)

Source: NASA/Chandra

Composite image of galaxy NGC 3115.
Image credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Alabama/K. Wong et al; Optical: ESO/VLT.

The flow of hot gas toward a black hole has been clearly imaged for the first time in X-rays. The observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will help tackle two of the most fundamental problems in modern astrophysics: understanding how black holes grow and how matter behaves in their intense gravity.

The black hole is at the center of a large galaxy known as NGC 3115, which is located about 32 million light years from Earth. A large amount of previous data has shown material falling toward and onto black holes, but none with this clear a signature of hot gas.

By imaging the hot gas at different distances from this supermassive black hole, astronomers have observed a critical threshold where the motion of gas first becomes dominated by the black hole's gravity and falls inward. This distance from the black hole is known as the "Bondi radius." (read more)

Source: MESSENGER Mission

Image credit: NASA/MESSENGER

The MESSENGER spacecraft continued to fine-tune its orbit around Mercury yesterday afternoon when mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., successfully executed the second orbit-correction maneuver of the mission.

On July 27, the 3-minute, 8-second engine burn stretched the spacecraft’s orbit around the innermost planet from 11 hours 48 minutes to a precise 12 hours. This second of an expected five maneuvers planned for the mission’s primary orbital phase began at 5:20 P.M. EDT, and used approximately 1.9 kilograms of fuel.

“MESSENGER’s first orbit-correction maneuver, which took place in June, reset the periapsis altitude of the orbit to 200 km, but also shortened the orbital period. This second maneuver has reset the period to its nominal value of 12 hours,” says APL’s Peter Bedini, MESSENGER project manager.

MESSENGER Mission Systems Engineer Eric Finnegan, of APL, said the engine burn was “on target and a sweet success. We’re precisely where we need to be to continue to capture amazing data from Mercury’s surface.” The next orbit-correction maneuver is scheduled for September 7 and will lower the periapsis altitude from about 470 kilometers back to 200 kilometers.

Source: NASA/WISE

Earth's New Trojan Friend.
Image credit: Paul Wiegert, University of Western Ontario, Canada.

Astronomers studying observations taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have discovered the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth.

Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or behind the planet. Because they constantly lead or follow in the same orbit as the planet, they never can collide with it. In our solar system, Trojans also share orbits with Neptune, Mars and Jupiter. Two of Saturn's moons share orbits with Trojans.

Scientists had predicted Earth should have Trojans, but they have been difficult to find because they are relatively small and appear near the sun from Earth's point of view.(read more)