Archive for the ‘Space’ Category

The Hubble Space Telescope’s journey crossed the double-decade mark today, and our readers and followers are celebrating the beloved satellite with their desktops.

For the past five weeks, we’ve asked followers of @wiredscience on Twitter to change their computer backgrounds to some of our favorite Hubble images and send us a photo of their workstations.This week, we featured Hubble’s newest image, a spectacular shot of part of the Carina Nebula. Above is our favorite Space Desk this week, from @moshbrown, who may have gotten some extra credit for having Wired Science on the desktop as well.

We’ve collected some of the best shots here from the whole series on the following pages. If you need more Space Desk, we’ve included links to each weeks’ gallery of entries.

Carina Nebula complete Space Desk gallery

This week’s honorable mentions:

Our first ever iPad entry is from @smbeaverson. This one might have taken top honors if it had been an actual photo of the iPad and its surroundings.

Also among our favorites is this shot from Jim Hanley, who may have cheated a little by including supercute photos of his kids in the frame.

We were already dreading the day Hubble dies, but this mind-blowing new image released to celebrate the space telescope’s 20th anniversary makes us wish for eternal life for the famous satellite even more.

This new gem rivals what may be Hubble’s most famous image, a shot of the Pillars of Creation taken in 1995. The shot above is of a star-forming region in the Carina Nebula. The enormous pillar of gas and dust is 3 light-years tall. The seam in the middle is the result of new stars forming and emitting powerful gas jets that are ripping the pillar apart.

Hubble’s capabilities are all the more impressive considering the rocky start the telescope suffered through when a defect was discovered in its primary mirror after it had been launched and began returning images that weren’t in focus. Scientists and engineers were able to fix the problem, and today Hubble is more capable than ever with its new Wide Field Camera 3, installed last year.

If you’ve read this far without making this image your computer desktop background, click here now. We’ve been celebrating Hubble on our desktops for the last month, by asking followers of @wiredscience on Twitter to send us a photo of their workstations with a different Hubble photo on their computer screens each week. So far we’ve featured the Black Eye Galaxy, the Eagle Nebula, Jupiter and the Cat’s Eye Nebula.

Send us a photo of your desk or office with the new Carina Nebula photo, on twitter or by e-mail, and we’ll tweet our favorite and include the best from all five weeks in a post on Wired Science later today.

Also, check out this interactive timeline of Hubble’s history, and the links below to more mind-blowing Hubble photos we’ve featured on Wired Science before.

Image: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)

See Also:

• Impressive New Hubble Image of Odd Galaxy Triplet
• Hubble Is Back! With New Stunning Images
• Hubble’s New Camera Delivers Another Stunner
• Hubble Captures Sparkling ‘Jewel Box’ Star Cluster
• Hubble Snaps Image of Triple Galaxy, as Ordered by the People
• Hubble Captures Images of Rare Mammoth Stars

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NASA’s latest space telescope, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, is delivering unprecedented images of our local star.

The telescope was launched Feb. 11. NASA released the first tremendously exciting data from the mission today.

“These initial images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of solar research,” said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA, in a release. “SDO will change our understanding of the sun and its processes, which affect our lives and society. This mission will have a huge impact on science, similar to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope on modern astrophysics.”

The sun’s internal dynamics were the subject of intense interest over the last few years as the normal waxing and waning of solar activity did not follow past cycles as closely as anticipated. The solar minimum of 2008 stretched deep into 2009, raising questions about how well we understand the complex internal dynamics that drive sun spots, solar flares and coronal-mass ejections.

Continue Reading “New Space Telescope Delivers First Mind-Blowing Video of the Sun” »

This new image of the Cat’s Paw Nebula reveals new details laid bare by the near-infrared imaging of the VISTA telescope.

The Cat’s Paw, located 5,500 light-years away in the Scorpius constellation is filled with dust that makes for a beautiful image (below) but obscures many of the stars. The European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope in the Chilean Atacama Desert is the most powerful near-infrared imager on Earth with a main mirror that is more than 13 feet across as well as the largest infrared camera on any telescope.

The new image clearly shows large, infant stars near the center of the nebula as well as many more older stars on the outskirts that hadn’t been seen before. Even near-infrared radiation can’t penetrate the densest areas of dust, which show up in the image as a dark swatch branching away from the center of the nebula.

Continue Reading “Spectacular New View of a Cosmic Cat’s Paw” »

Speaking at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center April 15, President Obama outlined a new plan for the space agency that would forgo sending astronauts back to the moon, but would send humans to an asteroid in 2025 and into orbit around Mars a decade later.

The strategy would rely on private aerospace companies to ferry crew and supplies into space. It would also cancel a program known as Constellation, which is aimed at developing a heavy-lift rocket and vehicles to carry astronauts back to the moon, in favor of pursuing a new rocket that would take humans beyond well beyond that destination.

“I am very happy about the introduction of new innovative commercial approaches in human space flight, because we’ve been trapped into a very bad cul-de-sac for 40 years,” says planetary scientist and former NASA associate administrator for science Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. Stern predicts that Congress is likely to approve Obama’s plan.

Continue Reading “Obama Lays Out New Vision for Asteroid, Mars Trips” »

The Allan Hills meteorite, named for the site where it was found in Antarctica, was once thought to contain fossil traces of life. That idea has been mostly dismissed, and now the rock also appears to be not quite as old as previously thought.

The oldest known Martian meteorite isn’t so old after all. Though it’s still the oldest chunk of Mars scientists have ever found, new research suggests the Allan Hills meteorite — officially known as ALH84001 — is about 400 million years younger than previously estimated.

A new analysis published in the April 15 Science pegs the meteorite’s age at a mere 4.091 billion years. Previously the meteorite was commonly accepted to have formed 4.51 billion years ago, when the planet’s surface was still solidifying out of its primordial magma ocean. But the new age indicates the rock would have formed during a later, chaotic period when Mars was being pummeled by meteorites that fractured and shocked the planet’s solid surface.

The Allan Hills meteorite has been a lightning rod for controversy since scientists announced in 1996 that it might hold fossils of Martian bacteria. The scientific community has since mostly abandoned that idea, as one by one every line of evidence for life has been given a non-biological explanation.

Continue Reading “Oldest Martian Meteorite Not as Old as Thought” »

A humanoid robot will visit space for the first time in September aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, NASA announced Wednesday.

The Robonaut 2, which was co-developed by NASA with General Motors, will serve as an assistant to the humans on board the International Space Station, using the same tools developed for astronauts.

While plain old robots, such as the Mars Phoenix Lander, are a major part of NASA’s operations, humanoid robots are a different story. There is significant science-fiction appeal to the idea of humanoid robotic helpers for humans, but does the idea makes more than literary sense? Yes, said Jeffrey Hoffman, an MIT aerospace professor and former astronaut.

“I’m a very strong believer in human-robotic interaction. You can build up a synergy to accomplish what neither humans nor robots could accomplish on their own,” Hoffman said. “That’s the inspiration behind Robonaut.”

Many successful robots, like Kiva’s product-distribution robots or the military’s little helpers look nothing like humans. And some space researchers like MIT historian and policy analyst David Mindell don’t think humanoid robots are a very good idea. But the International Space Station may be the perfect place for a humanoid robot.

“It’s incredibly important that Robonaut have a humanoid form factor because he’s being sent into space, and it’s incredibly expensive, and he has to do a lot to pay himself off,” said former roboticist Daniel Wilson (author of How to Build a Robot Army). “It has to be able to pick up any tool that an astronaut could use and go outside.”

Continue Reading “Why NASA Is Sending a Robot to Space That Looks Like You” »

The Cassini spacecraft has captured lightning flashing in a cloud on Saturn’s dark side in a first-of-its-kind video.

Scientists have picked up radio signals for years that indicated that lightning storms happened on the planet, but this is the first time that they were able to see and “hear” the electrical storms at the same time.

“This is the first time we have the visible lightning flash together with the radio data,” said Georg Fischer, a radio and plasma wave scientist based at the Space Research Institute in Graz, Austria, in a press release. “Now that the radio and visible light data line up, we know for sure we are seeing powerful lightning storms.”

The video was shot over 16 minutes and compressed down into the 10 seconds that you see here. The cloud, which is about 1,900 miles along its longest side, is illuminated by the reflection of Saturn’s rings. Each flash is about 190 miles (300 kilometers) across with an energy comparable to the most intense lightning here on Earth. In real time, they lasted for about one second.

The crackling soundtrack to the video is synthetic. It approximates the actual sounds received by Cassini’s radio recording instrument, which are above the human hearing range.

Images: NASA/JPL/SSI/University of Iowa

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

A bevy of backward-orbiting exoplanets could challenge theories of planet formation, new research suggests. The planets’ wonky orbits might also rule out the presence of Earthlike bodies in some planetary systems.

The wrong-way planets got where they are by cartwheeling over their stars’ heads, Andrew Collier Cameron of the University of St Andrews in Scotland proposed in an April 13 presentation at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland.

Planets are thought to form from the disk of gas and dust that surrounds a young star. Because the star and the disk both coalesce from the same cloud of material, theory holds that both should spin in the same direction — and so should any planets that arise. The “disk migration theory” posits that some planets should end up close to their stars by gently migrating inward over time, maintaining an orbital plane in line with the star’s rotation.

Last summer, astronomers first discovered a handful of planets that threw that idea for a loop. These planets orbit backward, opposite to the direction of their stars’ spin (SN: 9/12/09, p. 12). And other newly discovered planets that did have “forward” orbits were tilted 20 degrees or more with respect to the plane of the stellar disk where they were born.

Continue Reading “Rampaging Hot Jupiters May Keep Earthlike Planets Out of Their Systems” »

Huge new baby stars shine bright in this image of the Rosette Molecular Cloud.

The previously undiscovered protostars are the small points of orangey light in the center of the image. They are up to 10 times more massive than the sun.

The Herschel Space Observatory, operated by the European Space Agency, obtained the new image, which is a composite of three different wavelengths of light all in the infrared part of the spectrum. Infrared light waves are longer and scatter less than visible light, allowing scientists to probe dust-shrouded areas of space. In this image, the shortest wavelength is blue, the medium green, and the longest red.

The intense star-forming region of the Milky Way is about 5,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. This image shows only part of the massive cloud of dust. If the whole thing, seen below, were visible to the naked eye, it would be large in the sky, appearing around five times the size of a full moon.

Continue Reading “Gigantic Baby Stars Discovered in Cloud of Space Dust” »