SPACE
& SCIENCE NEWS: February 2006
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Saturn's inner moons – more rubble than
ice
(Feb 14, 2006)
Saturn's
small, inner moons may not be huge chunks of ice as once thought,
but rather "rubble piles" of material built up around small central
cores, a team of Cassini scientists suggests. Before the Cassini mission
to Saturn’s moons,
scientists knew small moons such as Pan, Atlas, Janus and Epimetheus
orbited the ringed planet. "But we didn't have good pictures of them.
We didn't have measurements of their shape," says Carolyn Porco, Cassini
Imaging Science Team leader from the Space Science Institute in Boulder,
Colorado. Image: Telesto, false-color.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Still-forming solar system may have planets
orbiting in opposite directions
(Feb 14, 2006)
Astronomers studying a disk of material circling a still-forming star
inside our Galaxy have found a tantalizing result – the inner
part of the disk is orbiting the protostar in the opposite direction
from the outer part of the disk. "This is the first time anyone has
seen anything like this, and it means that the process of forming
planets from such disks is more complex than we previously expected,"
said Anthony Remijan, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory,
who with his colleague Jan M. Hollis, of the NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center, used the National Science Foundation's Very
Large Array radio telescope to make the discovery.
Read
more. Source: NRAO |
US-built oxygen generator ready for space
station
(Feb 14, 2006)
A new US-built oxygen generation system is set to be launched to the
International Space Station
on the next shuttle, currently scheduled for May 2006. When the system
begins operating in 2007, it will bolster a Russian oxygen generator
that has suffered frequent breakdowns. Today, the main source of oxygen
on the station is the Russian-built Elektron unit, which uses an electric
current to convert liquid water into gaseous hydrogen and oxygen in
a process called electrolysis. But the Elektron has failed repeatedly
in the past, forcing ISS crew members to rely on oxygen reserves stored
on docked cargo vehicles or on solid "candles" that release oxygen.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Darwin's warm pond theory tested
(Feb 13, 2006)
Life on Earth was unlikely to have emerged from volcanic springs or
hydrothermal vents,
according to a leading US researcher. Experiments carried out in volcanic
pools suggest they do not provide the right conditions to spawn life.
The findings will be discussed on Tuesday at an international two-day
meeting to explore the latest thinking on the origin
of life on Earth.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
The dino-daddy of all meat eaters
(Feb 13, 2006)
The biggest, and possibly the baddest predatory dinosaur of them all
was not the fabled Tyrannosaurus rex, or even its slightly larger
rival Gigantosaurus, but a long-jawed, sail-backed creature called
Spinosaurus. An examination of some newly obtained fossils shows that
Spinosaurus stretched an impressive 17 meters from nose to tail, dwarfing
its meat-eating relatives. As well as being longer than its rivals,
Spinosaurus also had stronger arms with which to catch its prey, unlike
the puny-armed T. rex and its ilk.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Spirit Mars Rover reaches 'Home Plate':
Formation has researchers puzzled
(Feb 13, 2006)
NASA’s Spirit Mars
rover has arrived at a site dubbed "Home Plate" within Gusev
crater. But what the robot found has left scientists puzzled.
As the Mars machinery relays images of the area, the sightseeing has
sparked healthy debate within the team running the mission. "Well,
so far it has been great," said Steve Squyres, lead Mars Rover Exploration
scientist at Cornell University. "It's the most spectacular layered
rock we’ve ever seen at Gusev," he told SPACE.com.
Read
more. Source: space.com |
Fossett breaks record; makes emergency
landing
(Feb 12, 2006)
After surviving a major fuel loss, some turbulence that nearly ripped
his plane apart, and blowing out two tires on the landing, American
adventurer Steve Fossett Saturday broke the world's flight distance
record after traveling more than 26,000 miles (about 42,000 km) in
76 hours. And he did it all on less than two hours' sleep.
Read
more. Source: CNN |
New Horizons update
(Feb 11, 2006)New
Horizons continues to do well in flight – three weeks down
and 492 to go. With more than 99% of the journey to the Pluto
system still ahead of us, you might say we are just beginning –
and we are. But we have retired much of the risk we worried about
to reaching Pluto by getting a good launch and having our spacecraft
perform well with most of its basic functionality now checked out.
Recent tests have included checkout of our high-gain and medium-gain
antenna communications, checkouts of the spacecraft's ability to autonomously
find and point to the Sun and the Earth, and the calibration of our
onboard gyros.
Read
more. Source: New Horizons website, JHAPL |
'Man in the moon' origin may have been
found
(Feb 10, 2006)
Ohio State University planetary scientists have found the remains
of ancient lunar impacts that may have helped create the surface feature
commonly called the "man in the moon." Their study suggests that a
large object hit the far side of the moon
and sent a shock wave through the moon's core and all the way to the
Earth-facing side. The crust recoiled – and the moon bears the
scars from that encounter even today. The finding holds implications
for lunar prospecting, and may solve a mystery about how past impacts
on Earth affect it's geology today.
Read
more. Source: Ohio State Univ. |
Dusty discs found around hypergiant stars
(Feb 9, 2006)
Dusty discs appear to surround two extremely massive stars that blast
their surroundings with searing radiation, new observations with NASA's
Spitzer
Space Telescope reveal. The finding bolsters other evidence suggesting
planets may be able to form in violent environments. Planets are thought
to build up gradually from the collision of clumps of dust in discs
of gas and dust around stars. Most of the dusty discs discovered so
far surround stars of similar size to the Sun. But now, researchers
led by Joel Kastner of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New
York, have found dusty discs that appear to surround two hypergiant
stars, dozens of times more massive than the Sun.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
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