The Space Report

Space News, updated every weekday

Space News From SpaceDaily.Com

Manned Moon Shot Possible by 2020

Moscow, Russia (RIA Novosti) Feb 06, 2012
A crewed mission to the moon is possible by 2020, the head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, Vladimir Popovkin, said in an interview with the Ekho Moskvy radio station on Thursday. "Today science is ripe for using the moon. I think that by 2020 a man will land on the moon," Popovkin said. He also said Russia's previously announced cosmonaut recruitment drive will focus on preparing

Elements of ExoPlanets

Moffet Field CA (NASA) Feb 06, 2012
Trace elements in stars may influence the evolution of habitable zones around them where life as we know it might dwell, scientists now find. Stars are made nearly entirely from hydrogen and helium gas. Still, traces of heavier elements - which astronomers call metals, even if they are not what one normally think of as metals - can be found in stars as well, either inherited from the remai

The discovery of deceleration

Munich, Germany (SPX) Feb 06, 2012
Pulsars are among the most exotic celestial bodies known. They have diameters of about 20 kilometres, but at the same time roughly the mass of our sun. A sugar-cube sized piece of its ultra-compact matter on the Earth would weigh hundreds of millions of tons. A sub-class of them, known as millisecond pulsars, spin up to several hundred times per second around their own axes. Previous studi

Juno Spacecraft Refines its Path to Jupiter

Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 06, 2012
NASA's solar-powered Juno spacecraft successfully refined its flight path Wednesday with the mission's first trajectory correction maneuver. The maneuver took place on Feb. 1. It is the first of a dozen planned rocket firings that, over the next five years, will keep Juno on course for its rendezvous with Jupiter. "We had a maneuver planned soon after launch but our Atlas V rocket gave us

NASA Spacecraft Reveals New Observations of Interstellar Matter

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 06, 2012
NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has captured the best and most complete glimpse yet of what lies beyond the solar system. The new measurements give clues about how and where our solar system formed, the forces that physically shape our solar system, and the history of other stars in the Milky Way. The Earth-orbiting spacecraft observed four separate types of atoms including hy

How Do You Fight Fire in Space?

San Diego CA (SPX) Feb 06, 2012
Improving fire-fighting techniques in space and getting a better understanding of fuel combustion here on Earth are the focus of a series of experiments on the International Space Station, led by a professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. to A first round of experiments ran from March 2009 to December 2011. A second round kicked off in January and

IBEX spacecraft measures 'alien' particles from outside solar system

San Antonio TX (SPX) Feb 06, 2012
Using data from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, an international team of researchers has measured neutral "alien" particles entering our solar system from interstellar space. A suite of studies published in the Astrophysical Journal provide a first look at the constituents of the interstellar medium, the matter between star systems, and how they interact with our heliosp

Program Glitch Led to Russian Mars Probe Failure

Moscow, Russia (RIA Novosti) Feb 06, 2012
A government commission has blamed Russian programmers for the recent failure of Russia's Phobos-Grunt Mars probe, the Kommersant daily said on Tuesday citing a space industry source. The commission, which submitted its final report to the head of Russia's Federal Space Agency Vladimir Popovkin late on Monday, concluded that the main cause of the failure was "a programming error which led

Lavrov to Discuss Space, Nuclear Cooperation in Australia

Sydney, Australia (RIA Novosti) Feb 06, 2012
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will discuss bilateral cooperation in high-tech industries, including space and nuclear power, during his one-day working visit to Australia on Tuesday. The visit marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries. "Moscow regards Australia as an important and prospective partner in the fast-developing Asia-Pa

Engine Failure Behind Meridian Satellite Crash

Voronezh, Russia (RIA Novosti) Feb 06, 2012
The crash of Russia's Meridian communication satellite late last year was caused by the destruction of one of the Soyuz-2 carrier rocket's engines, the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, Vladimir Popovkin, said on Tuesday. "An inter-agency commission has concluded that the reason was an early opening of the combustion section of the rocket's third stage," Popovkin said during a meetin

Blowing Up Stars

Tempe AZ (SPX) Feb 06, 2012
For his discoveries about the lives and deaths of stars, the exotic physics of black holes and the origin of chemical elements, UA Regents' Professor David Arnett has been honored with the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship. What happens when a star dies? How does a black hole form? What makes the chemical elements that form the building blocks of stars, planets and living beings? Thos

Russia May Run Repeat Mission to Phobos

Voronezh, Russia (RIA Novosti) Feb 06, 2012
Russia will send another sample mission to the Martian moon Phobos if the European Space Agency (ESA) decides not to include Russia in its ExoMars program, the head of Russia's space agency said on Tuesday. Phobos-Grunt, Russia's most ambitious planetary mission in decades, was launched on November 9, however, it was lost due to propulsion failure and fell back to Earth on January 15.

Remnant of an Explosion With a Powerful Kick?

Boston MA (SPX) Feb 06, 2012
Vital clues about the devastating ends to the lives of massive stars can be found by studying the aftermath of their explosions. In its more than twelve years of science operations, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has studied many of these supernova remnants sprinkled across the Galaxy. The latest example of this important investigation is Chandra's new image of the supernova remnant know

A pocket of star formation

Paris, France (SPX) Feb 06, 2012
NGC 3324 is located in the southern constellation of Carina (The Keel, part of Jason's ship the Argo) roughly 7500 light-years from Earth. It is on the northern outskirts of the chaotic environment of the Carina Nebula, which has been sculpted by many other pockets of star formation ( a href="http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso0905/">eso0905 /a>). A rich deposit of gas and dust in the NGC 3

Precision space maneuvers

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Feb 06, 2012
Spacecraft must operate with utmost precision when conducting landing maneuvers on other planets, or docking to a space station. To ensure they do not drift off course, imaging sensors collect a flood of data that are analyzed in real time. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology FIRST have engineered a system based on multicore technologie

Universe Today

Asteroid Vesta Floats in Space in High Resolution 3-D

The giant Asteroid Vesta literally floats in space in a new high resolution 3-D image of the battered bodies Eastern Hemisphere taken by NASA’s Dawn Asteroid Orbiter. Haul out your red-cyan 3-D anaglyph glasses and lets go whirling around Vesta and sledding down mountains to greet the alien Snowman! The sights are fabulous ! The [...]

Super Bowl Cities Seen From Space

If you live in or are from the US, you probably know that today is Super Bowl Sunday. Whatever you happen to be doing, be it tailgating in Indianapolis, getting together with friends and family (and plenty of hot wings and nachos) in your living room or just waiting for all the fuss to be [...]

The Milky Way’s Magnetic Personality

Recently we took a look at a very unusual type of map – the Faraday Sky. Now an international team of scientists, including those at the Naval Research Laboratory, have pooled their information and created one of the most high precision maps to date of the Milky Way’s magnetic fields. Like all galaxies, ours has [...]

Journal Club – Neutrino Vision

According to Wikipedia, a journal club is a group of individuals who meet regularly to critically evaluate recent articles in the scientific literature. And of course, the first rule of Journal Club is… don’t talk about Journal Club. So, without further ado – today’s journal article is about the latest findings in neutrino astronomy. Today’s [...]

Recycling Pulsars – The Millisecond Matters…

It’s a millisecond pulsar… a rapidly rotating neutron star and it’s about to reach the end of its mass gathering phase. For ages the vampire of this binary system has been sucking matter from a donor star. It has been busy, spinning at incredibly high rotational speeds of about 1 to 10 milliseconds and shooting [...]

New Study Shows How Trace Elements Affect Stars’ Habitable Zones

Habitable zones are the regions around stars, including our own Sun, where conditions are the most favourable for the development of life on any rocky planets that happen to orbit within them. Generally, they are regions where temperatures allow for liquid water to exist on the surface of these planets and are ideal for “life [...]

Beautiful Conjunction: Comet Garradd Meets M92

This lovely image of Comet Garradd (C/2009 PI) as it passes by the globular cluster M92 in the constellation Hercules, was taken remotely from the Tzek Maun Observatory in New Mexico by our friends Giovanni Sostero, Ernest Guido and Nick Howes. While the two objects look like they are right next to each other, M92 [...]

Cities at Night Panorama of Millions of US East Coast Earthlings

Do you live here? Tens of millions of Earthlings live and work in the bustling and seemingly intertwined American mega-metropolis of the Philadelphia-New York City-Boston corridor (bottom-center splotch) captured in this stunning “Cities at Night” panorama of the East Coast of the United States along the Atlantic seaboard (image above). Look northward and you’ll see [...]

Incredible 3-D View Inside a Martian Crater

This is why I always keep a pair of 3-D glasses by my computer. This well-preserved crater on Mars may look like just your average, run-of-the-mill impact crater in 2-D, but in 3-D, the sharply raised rim, the deep, cavernous crater body, and especially the steep crater walls will have you grabbing your armchairs so [...]

Can We Land On a Comet?

The Rosetta mission will do something never before attempted: land on a comet. The spacecraft is now on its way to intercept comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in January 2014 and land a probe on it for what promises to be an amazing view. But what we know of comets so far comes from a few flyby missions. [...]