SPACE
& SCIENCE NEWS: November 2005
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Japanese asteroid probe apparently lost
in space
(Nov 14, 2005)
Japan's space agency suffered another glitch in its mission to collect
surface samples from an asteroid and return to Earth when a can-sized
robot lander apparently became lost in space while attempting a practice
touch down. The rehearsal landing followed an earlier attempt that
was aborted due to mechanical trouble, but the space agency said it
is still targeting actual landings on the potato-shaped asteroid Itokawa
on Nov. 19 and Nov. 25.
Read
more. Source: space.com/AP |
McCartney in live space broadcast
(Nov 13, 2005)
Sir Paul McCartney has become the first musician to broadcast live
music to an audience in space. The former Beatles member treated two
astronauts at the international space station to a live wake-up call
with the Beatles song Good Day Sunshine. The performance was broadcast
to the crew, 220 miles (354km) above Earth, from a concert in California.
Sir Paul said he decided to make the broadcast after Nasa used the
song to wake the Space Shuttle Discovery crew.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
Technical hitch delays Ariane 5
(Nov 13, 2005)
A technical problem has delayed Saturday's lift-off from French Guiana
of Europe's heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket. Space officials postponed
the mission shortly before launch from the Kourou spaceport. The rocket
operator, Arianespace, said a problem had been encountered during
the final preparations. The heavy-lift vehicle was set to blast-off
carrying its largest payload yet of two telecoms satellites weighing
more than eight tonnes.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
Black hole ate my twin, but it cant catch
me
(Nov 12, 2005)
A young star has been caught in the act of speeding out of the galaxy
– seemingly on the run from a giant black hole that had already
swallowed its twin. Astronomers used the UVES spectrograph on the
Very Large Telescope in Chile to spot the young runaway, called HE
0437-5439, in the dark outer reaches of the Milky Way. The star appears
to be 30 million years old and about eight times the mass of the Sun.
It drew notice in part because it was found in a vast enclave of ancient
stars most of them billions of years old that surrounds the disc
of the galaxy like a bubble.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Surprising star birth seen in bear-shaped
nebula
(Nov 12, 2005)
Nearly 5000 faint, embryonic stars have been found in a small galaxy
that orbits the Milky Way, a new Hubble Space Telescope image reveals.
The find confirms that star formation occurs in the same way even
in very different galaxies. Astronomers led by Antonella Nota at the
European Space Agency used Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to
view a star-forming region about 210,000 light years away, called
N66. The 300-light-year-wide stellar nursery, in the rough shape of
a bear cub, lies in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy on
the outskirts of the Milky Way.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Hardy lichen shown to survive in space
(Nov 11, 2005)
Lichens can survive unprotected in the harsh conditions of space,
a European Space Agency experiment discovers. The organisms are a
composite of algae and fungi. They are commonly found on the surface
of rocks on Earth and can survive in extreme conditions such as high
mountains latitudes. Lichens are the most complex form of life now
known to have survived prolonged exposure to space. In an experiment
led by Leopoldo Sancho from the Complutense University of Madrid,
two species of lichen Rhizocarpon geographicum and Xanthoria elegans
were sealed in a capsule and launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket
on 31 May 2005.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
NASA seeks private space-ferries
(Nov 10, 2005)
NASA is looking to private companies to launch both supplies and astronauts
to the International Space Station, it announced this week. The agency
will form a separate office at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas
to coordinate contracted trips to the station. It will be called the
Commercial Crew/Cargo Project Office (CC/CPO). On 22 November, NASA
is scheduled to officially request proposals from companies, who must
submit their ideas by 27 January 2006.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Gravity tug to deflect asteroids
(Nov 10, 2005)
Two NASA astronauts say they have devised a plan to stop an asteroid
potentially colliding with Earth. The US spacemen Edward Lu and Stanley
Love propose sending up a huge rocket to "tow" away any such objects.
Their vehicle would simply hover over the asteroid and use gravity
as a "towline" to move it out of danger. A 20-tonne craft could safely
deflect an asteroid 200m across in about a year of such "towing",
Lu and Love report in the journal Nature. Scientists believe that
if an asteroid this size collided with the planet, it would cause
widespread damage and loss of life.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
Europe's Venus mission blasts off
(Nov 9, 2005)
The first space mission in more than a decade to Earth's closest neighbour,
Venus, has lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Europe's Venus Express probe blasted off on a Russian rocket at 0333
GMT on Wednesday. The robotic craft will orbit the planet to study
its atmosphere, which has experienced runaway greenhouse warming.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
Intergalactic attraction creates bumper
star crop
(Nov 8, 2005)
Hundreds of new stars are igniting in the wake of intense gravitational
interactions between four galaxies, new observations reveal. The four
galaxies – called Robert's Quartet – lie about 160 million
light years from Earth in the southern constellation Phoenix. They
are crowded into a space just 150,000 light years across – only
1.5 times the width of our galaxy, the Milky Way. That proximity makes
them one of the best known examples of a compact group of galaxies,
whose members gravitationally disturb each other.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
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