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| I Dig Space |
Inside this simulated Mars rock is a real rock from space! Use the included tool in this "I Dig Space" kit to dig out the tektite. Tektites are small black, glassy rocks that are believed to be formed when a meteor strike throws terrestrial material back out of the atmosphere and then it reenters as a meteorite. Order now! from Countdown Creations.
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| Image credit: NASA |
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| Spacecraft Designer Maxime Faget Passes Away |
| Oct 12, 2004 - Dr. Maxime Faget, one of the most prolific of NASA's spacecraft designers, passed away on Saturday at the age of 83. Faget contributed to designs to every single NASA spacecraft, from the Mercury capsule to the space shuttle. He started working with for the US space effort in 1946, when he joined the staff of the Langley Research Center as a research scientist. He was later selected as one of the original 35 designers for the Mercury project. Faget retired from NASA in 1981, and went on to work for a private space firm called Space Industries Inc. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: ESA |
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| Worldwide Pollution Levels Seen From Space |
| Oct 12, 2004 - After 18 months of observations by the Envisat Earth monitoring satellite, the European Space Agency has produced a detailed image of the entire Earth that shows nitrogen dioxide pollution. Nitrogen dioxide is generally a man-made gas - produced in power plants, heavy industry, and burning - which can cause lung disease and respiratory problems. Previous maps like this have been made, but this image is at a resolution of 60 x 30 km (37 x 19 miles), so scientist can pick out individual cities which are a source of pollution. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: ESA |
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| Dust Obscured Martian Landscape |
| Oct 12, 2004 - This image of a Martian landscape was taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft in May 2004. It shows an area in the Promethei Terra region, which is relatively smooth, but covered with a layer of dust or volcanic ash several tens of metres thick. This layer has covered everything, and obscures fine details; that's why the picture looks a little fuzzy. The crisscrossing lines across the picture are the tracks left by dust devils. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA/JPL |
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| Rovers Still Turning Up Water Evidence |
| Oct 8, 2004 - Now operating three times longer than originally expected, NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers are still turning up fresh evidence that liquid water once flowed on Mars. Opportunity has found a rock, dubbed "Escher", which has a network of cracks similar to cracked mud when the water has dried up. On the other side of Mars, Spirit is still climbing up the "Columbia Hills", and it seems that every rock it looks at shows evidence that it was altered by water. "We haven't seen a single unaltered volcanic rock, since we crossed the boundary from the plains into the hills, and I'm beginning to suspect we never will," said principal investigator Dr. Steve Squyres. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: Caltech |
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| Motion of Material in the Early Universe |
| Oct 8, 2004 - Researchers from Caltech have looked deep into space to a time when early material in the Universe was swirling towards the creation of galaxy clusters and superclusters. They did their measurements using an instrument in the Chilean Andes called the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI), which looks at the Universe when it was only 400,000 years old - a time before galaxies, stars, and planets had formed. By watching the motion of this material as it began forming larger structures, the researchers were able to confirm that dark matter and dark energy were having an effect even then. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA/JPL |
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| Epsom Salts Could Be a Source of Martian Water |
| Oct 7, 2004 - Researchers from Indiana University have found that under Mars-like conditions, Epsom-like salts can contain a significant amount of water. This could help explain why NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft discovered a large amount of water near the surface of Mars, but it's not visible. To get to the bottom of this possibility, the researchers have been funded by NASA to help build an X-ray diffractometer, which a future rover would use to analyze crystals on Mars to see if they're the right kind of salt that could contain water. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: Gemini |
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| It Gave Until it Couldn't Give Any More |
| Oct 6, 2004 - Astronomers using the Gemini observatories have got themselves a bit of a mystery. They've found a binary system at EF Eridanus, located 300 light-years away from Earth, where one of the objects defies classification. It's about the size of Jupiter but it's way too massive to be a planet. It's the temperature of a brown dwarf, but its light doesn't match a brown dwarf's characteristics. The researchers believe that the object was once a regular star, but then it had most of its material stripped away by the gravity of the larger star over the course of 5 billions years. Eventually it just couldn't give any more. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA/JPL |
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| Rover's Wheels Acting Up |
| Oct 6, 2004 - A problem with the wheels on NASA's Spirit rover has stopped it dead in its tracks on the surface of Mars. For some reason, the rover's right-front and left-rear wheels stopped operating as commanded on Oct. 1. NASA engineers have performed a series of diagnostic tests to understand which systems could be affected, and they're still analyzing the results. One fix would be to permanently disable the brakes on those wheels, but it could put the rover at an increased risk. Spirit has now traveled 3.6 km (2.2 miles) across the surface of Mars; much further than it was designed for, so it's no surprise it's starting to have some mechanical problems. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA/JPL |
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| The Great Observatories Examine Kepler's Supernova |
| Oct 6, 2004 - On October 9, 1604, a new star appeared in the sky as bright as any of the planets. Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, was one of the astronomers at the time who tried to study this supernova, before telescopes were even invented. Now NASA has turned its Great Observatories (Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer) on the supernova remnant, and produced an image that shows it in many different wavelengths of light. The combined image shows a bubble-shaped shroud of gas and dust 14 light-years wide expanding at 6 million kph (4 million mph). (Full Story) |
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| Book Review: New Moon Rising |
| Oct 5, 2004 - NASA has had two momentous changes in the last few years. One is the loss of the Columbia shuttle. Two is the replacement of administrator Daniel Goldin by Sean O'Keefe. In their book New Moon Rising, Frank Sietzen and Keith Cowing claim that the consequence of these changes is that NASA finally has things right and will accomplish their new vision; to send humans to live in space. This is a very bold claim and though there is not much factual content to support this, the book does provide good detail on the process by which NASA obtained this vision. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA |
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| Astronaut Gordon Cooper Dies |
| Oct 5, 2004 - Astronaut Gordon Cooper, who piloted missions in both the Mercury and Gemini programs, died on Monday at his home in Ventura, California; he was 77. Cooper was the youngest of the original 7 Mercury astronauts, and his mission on May 15, 1963 - the final one in the Mercury program - lasted more than 34 hours and 22 orbits. Cooper and Pete Conrad flew the third flight of the Gemini program in 1965, and stayed in space for 191 hours, establishing a new space endurance record. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA/JPL |
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| Study Predicts Quakes Nearly Perfectly |
| Oct 5, 2004 - A NASA-funded study has predicted 15 of California's 16 largest earthquakes this decade, demonstrating that scientists are finally getting a handle on the warning signs that lead to big quakes. The team looked at historical earthquake data back to 1932, and then used this to build a model that predicts earthquake hotspots in California. One warning sign that a big quake is going to happen is when there's a series of small earthquakes above magnitude 3 which indicate that pressure is building up; another is when the fault appears to stop entirely. (Full Story) |
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| Image credit: NASA |
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| Infrared View of Mount Saint Helens |
| Oct 5, 2004 - NASA scientists flew a small aircraft equipped with a special infrared camera above Mount Saint Helens last week to see if this perspective would give any insights into what's happening underneath the surface. Shortly after they took this image, the volcano spewed out a large blast of steam. The team had actually been planning this mission for quite a while, so it was a complete coincidence that they arrived when the volcano was about to erupt. (Full Story) |
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Copyright © 1999-2004 Universe Today, All rights reserved.
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