Skymania News | Space headlines

Southern Pinwheel is cosmic cracker

2009-11-05T22:44:00.002Z

Tonight's the night that the skies of Britain are filled with fireworks as people celebrate Guy Fawkes' bid to blow up Parliament in 1605. But for really spectacular fireworks, just look at this cracker of an image from the new camera fitted to the Hubble space telescope.

It shows a myriad of new stars bursting into existence in a cosmic catherine wheel of a spiral galaxy called Messier 83 (M83).

The galaxy is commonly known as the Southern Pinwheel among amateur astronomers and lies 15 million light-years away in the constellation of Hydra, the water snake.

Star birth is happening at a faster rate in M83 than in our own Milky Way galaxy, particularly in its heart. Hubble's new instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3 fitted by shuttle astronauts in May, reveals hundreds of young star clusters, ancient swarms of globular star clusters, plus hundreds of thousands of individual stars, mainly blue supergiants and red supergiants.

The camera views the universe in a wide range of wavelengths, from ultraviolet to near-infrared, revealing stars at different stages of their life. It shows that the newest generations of stars are forming largely in clusters on the edges of dark lanes of dust in the spiral arms. Only a few million years old, these young stars stand out as bubbles of brightly glowing reddish hydrogen gas.

The young stars’ fierce winds of charged particles eventually blow away the gas, revealing bright blue star clusters aged from about one million to 10 million years. Older-still populations of stars are not as blue.

A bar of stars, gas, and dust can be seen slicing across the core of the galaxy and may be provoking most of the star birth in the galaxy’s core, say astronomers. Also visible are the remains of about 60 supernova blasts - five times more than were known to exist.

Picture: Hubble's detailed view of star birth in the graceful, curving arms nearby spiral galaxy M83. Credit: NASA.

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©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Phoenix snapped in icy overcoat

2009-11-05T13:40:00.002Z

Back in May, I wrote that NASA's latest Mars lander, Phoenix, was wearing "a thick overcoat of frost" in a feature for BBC Sky at Night magazine.

I never expected actually to see that wintry shroud. But astonishing new pictures by a powerful space camera have picked out the scene, high in the martian arctic.

The HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter picked out the now silent Phoenix, blanketed with frozen carbon dioxide, as winter began to give way to spring.

Phoenix in July 2009

The probe had pictured the craft before during martian summer at the landing site on the plains of Vastitas Planum 68%deg; north in the planet's northern hemisphere.

At that time, in June 2008, the region was frost-free and the robot lander was busy digging into the soil to find water ice and observing martian weather following its successful landing on 26 May. The probe stood out clearly - along with the discarded parachute and heat shield in the full wide-angle image.

Lighting was poor for the latest pictures, taken in July and August this year, with the sun low over the horizon and atmospheric haze. But the probe is once again visible though much less distinctly thanks to its icy coating. HiRISE scientists at the University of Arizona say the apparent brightness of areas in the newer photos do not necessarily represent the amount of frost.

Phoenix in June 2008

Even darker areas on the winter pictures are in reality brighter than the soil around the lander in the summer image. The reason they look darker is due to the processing of the raw data in producing the pictures.

Phoenix fell silent just over a year ago, on 2 November 2008. The Phoenix team were planning to try to see if it could be raised from the dead around now.

Principal Investigator Professor Peter Smith told Skymania News: He said: "Frosts of around -130C can create a layer on the surface as much as 30cm deep and in some places even a meter.

"That's solid, dry ice - you'd need a chisel to get down through it, so when the spacecraft is encased in that kind of environment, with no heaters and no power, it's a very difficult time."

He added: "The chances of recovering Phoenix are about the same odds as winning the lottery. Firstly, the solar panels may break under the weight of the ice, and once they're broken there's no hope. You have to worry about the electronics themselves and whether they are capable of surviving at those temperatures. Then you have to worry about the instruments. So it's a slim chance - but it's not zero."

Pictures: Phoenix pictured covered in frost in July 2009 (top) and during summer in June 2008 (bottom). Credit: NASA.

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©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Cosmic glow is map of early universe

2009-11-03T22:48:00.002Z

Astronomers have peered billions of years back in time to make detailed maps of the early cosmos. They used a giant telescope near the South Pole to observe a faintly glowing echo of the young universe.

An international team jointly led by Professor Walter Gear of Cardiff University and Professor Sarah Church of America's Stanford University has drawn up a picture of structure emerging in this so-called cosmic microwave background.

Their findings confirm that normal matter in the universe accounts for only a twentieth (five per cent) of what is there.

It means that an amazing 95 per cent of the universe must be formed of invisible dark matter and dark energy, as predicted in the standard cosmological model.

The team's results are revealed in the November 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. They were achieved by measuring variations in the temperature of the background glow and how the light is polarized using the 2.6-meter QUaD telescope.

That told the astronomers where matter existed and how it was moving about when the universe was less than half a billion years old. Its age is now around 13.8 billion years. It follows other recent discoveries about the cosmos in its early days.

Professor Gear said: "Studying the CMB radiation has given us extremely precise pictures of the universe at just 400,000 years old. When we first started working on this project the polarization of the CMB hadn't even been detected and we thought we might be able to find something wrong with the theory.

"The fact that these superb data fit the theory so beautifully is in many ways even more amazing. This reinforces the view that researchers are on the right track and need to learn more about the strange nature of dark energy and dark matter if we are to fully understand the workings of the universe."

Picture: A representational "map" of the temperature and polarization of the cosmic microwave background and the 2.6-meter telescope that observed it. Credit: Cardiff University School of Physics and Astronomy.

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Cassini tastes jets for alien life

2009-11-03T14:04:00.000Z

NASA scientists are checking for signs of alien life after a space probe finally got to taste water spurting from a distant moon. The Cassini spacecraft made a daring dive through a spectacular jet of ice and vapour erupting from one of Saturn's major satellites, Enceladus.

Previously the robotic probe had avoided the salty geysers squirting from the moon's south pole region. But on Monday it took a calculated risk to fly into a dense part of a plume just 60 miles (around 100 km) above the surface.

The probe survived the close encounter, spending around a minute inside the plume. Now data is being analysed to check for organic molecules - or even simple microbial life such as bacteria.

Space scientists believe there may be a sea of liquid water where life could flourish beneath the surface of Enceladus which is 318 miles (512 km) wide.

The geysers erupt from fissures dubbed tiger stripes and have already been found to contain organic chemicals by Cassini during a more distant flyby last year.

The first pictures from the latest flight over Enceladus have not yet been processed by the Cassini team, but the raw images are spectacular enough and may be found here. Cassini has flown closer to Enceladus but never directly into a plume.

Picture: A raw but spectacular image shows jets of water and ice erupting from a crescent Enceladus. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

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Let's go sailing on lakes of Titan!

2009-11-01T13:28:00.002Z

Space scientists in the US and UK are planning an incredible mission to go sailing on an alien lake on the far side of the solar system.

They are proposing a mission in NASA's low-cost Discovery series to launch an unmanned, nuclear-powered "boat" to Saturn's biggest moon Titan in 2015.

It would bob about on a vast sea of liquid methane called Ligeia Mare, radioing home photos and other data for six months.

Ligeia Mare is more than 300 miles wide and bigger than America's vast Lake Superior. The space scientists believe it is big enough that they can target their probe to dive straight into the lake.

The mission, called TIME (Titan Mare Explorer) comes after the British team successfully soft-landed a European probe on Titan - the most Earthlike world in the solar system - in January 2005. Titan, which is bigger than our own Moon, has rivers, lakes and coastal features just like our planet - though they are formed by methane, not water.

Europe's lander, called Huygens, sent home pictures of them as it parachuted through Titan's thick orange atmosphere. But it only worked for less than an hour on the surface before losing power. Its sister probe, NASA's Cassini craft, has since discovered clouds and rain on Titan during flybys as it orbits Saturn.

The new TIME probe to Titan will be built by scientists who created Beagle 2, the British craft that crashed on Mars on Christmas Day 2003, together with a US company, Proxemy Research of Maryland.

The Brits are led by Professor John Zarnecki, head of the Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research at the Open University in Milton Keynes.

His previous successes included building a camera for the Hubble space telescope, a dust detector on a probe to Halley's Comet and Beagle 2 with mutton-chopped colleague Professor Colin Pillinger.

He is also a project leader on a mission called Rosetta that is currently flying to another comet, called Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and Europe's ExoMars mission to put a rover on the surface of the Red Planet.

Professor Zarnecki told Skymania News: "It is a relatively small craft targeted to do one thing and so relatively low-cost. Titan is a very active place chemically in the atmpshere and on the surface. We want to discover more about Titan's methane weather cycle - like the water cycle on Earth.

"We want to determine the depth of the lake and if it is murky or clear and what is floating in it, plus look at the shorelines. We'd also want to look for organic materials. Understanding Titan better might also tell us more about whether it is possible for life to develop there."

Last year, NASA discovered a sea of water and ammonia 60 miles beneath Titan's crusty surface. Professor Zarnecki believes primitive life may exist there, kick-started by heat from the orange moon's core.

He said: "We know that Titan is swimming in organic chemicals. There has got to be some energy down there and it would not take much energy to allow life to begin."

Picture: The giant lake Ligeia Mare pictured by the Cassini spaceprobe. (Credit: NASA).

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Best view yet of Apollo landing site

2009-10-29T14:36:00.002Z

A NASA spaceprobe has sent back the clearest photo yet of an Apollo landing site - including even the US flag. It clearly shows the descent stage of Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger, nearly 37 years after it touched down in December 1972 in the Taurus Littrow valley.

The new LRO image. Click it to enlarge

For the first time even its legs are visible, thanks to the detail possible with the orbiting digital camera. Tracks can be seen from the astronauts' runabout - the Lunar Roving Vehicle - because there is no atmosphere to weather them. (There is a photo of one of an LRV here).

Experiments and antennae placed by spacemen Jack Schmitt and Gene Cernan can be picked out plus the place where the vehicle was abandoned - parked to record the astronauts blasting off back to Earth from the final Apollo mission to the Moon.

Amazingly, even the American flag, the Stars and Stripes is visible in the image, which NASA must hope will provide the clearest proof to conspiracy theorists that the Apollo programme was not faked.

The new picture was possible because the robotic probe, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, has moved into its new lower mapping orbit just 30 miles (50 km) above the Moon's surface.

The 13 ft (4-metre) wide lunar module is just eight pixels across on the picture. See NASA's hi-res photo here, annotated with names of experiments or other
features. Newly enhanced video of the first Moon landing, by Apollo 11, was released earlier this year.

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Hole in the Moon could give shelter

2009-10-26T12:59:00.001Z

Space scientists have discovered an odd hole in the Moon. They believe the deep pit - the first ever found - leads to a huge underground tunnel, called a lava tube.

The hole, which is about 70 yards wide, lies in a volcanic area on the Moon's near side called Marius Hills.

It was spotted as a dark dot as researchers scoured photos taken by Japan's Kaguya probe before it ended its mission by crashing in June.

The hole appears to be at least 90 yards deep and the rock pattern suggests that it is connected to a tunnel 400 yards wide.

Astronomers believe underground tunnels may be common the on Moon, caused by molten lava that flowed billions of years ago.

But this is the first found with an entrance. Experts say it could be adapted to shelter future lunar colonists from deadly radiation from the Sun and space. The discovery came as Japanese and German scientists searched for signs of "skylights" or entrances to the underground tunnels.

"This is the first time that anybody's actually identified a skylight in a possible lava tube" on the Moon, Carolyn van der Bogert of the University of Münster, in Germany, told New Scientist online.

Scientists are now waiting for NASA's latest Moon probe, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, to take detailed close-up pictures of the hole to tell them more about it.

Picture: A photo from Kaguya showing the strange hole. (Credit: ISAS, JAXA, Junichi Haruyama et al.)

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Here's what that UFO was really

2009-10-22T09:49:00.000Z

Most UFOs reported have perfectly rational explanations, a leading UK astronomy publication says this week. Ten top cases of mistaken identity are reported in the latest issue of BBC Sky at Night Magazine in an article by Vincent Whiteman.

In no particular order, they are:

1. Chinese lanterns. Paper lanterns bought for celebrations can float up to a mile high. They make no sound, have an orange glow and can fly in formation due to being tied together with string.

2. A bright meteor. A sudden fireball swiftly crossing the sky before vanishing can spook anxious witnesses into thinking they're seeing fast-moving aliens.

3. The Moon. In 2007, a woman phoned police in Wales to report a 'bright stationary object' that had been floating in the air for 30 minutes. An officer confirmed it was the Moon.

4. An odd-shaped cloud. Lenticular clouds have a classic flying-saucer shape. They form over mountains and can remain stationary for hours.

5. Lens flare. Light bouncing off the glass elements of a camera lens can look like solid objects on photos and can be mistaken for spacecraft.

6. Top secret aircraft. Spyplanes developed by the military, such as the Stealth bomber, were reported as UFOs before their existence was officially revealed.

7. A planet. Venus is so bright in the evening or morning sky that it is frequently mistaken for a hovering UFO. Jupiter is also currently bright, low in the evening sky, puzzling many onlookers.

8. The International Space Station. Man's orbiting outpost is now bigger than Wembley's football pitch and looks brilliant. It is silent as it crosses the sky, confusing those used to hearing aircraft engines.

9. An Iridium flare. A constellation of 66 communications satellites, usually invisible, will suddenly flare brightly when their highly reflective antennae are turned towards the earth.

10. Military satellites. Top secret satellites launched in the 1970s to track Russian ships orbit in groupe of three and can look like a group of flying saucers flying silently in formation across the night sky.

Chris Bramley, of BBC Sky at Night Magazine, said: "The truth really is out there - but it is probably not down to aliens!"

You can read a full version of "So you thought you saw a UFO?", complete with pictures, in the November issue of BBC Sky at Night Magazine, which is on sale now, price £4.25 in the UK. For more information, visit www.skyatnightmagazine.com.

Picture: The International Space Station leaves trails in this time-exposure as it passes silently across the night sky. (Credit: Paul Sutherland).

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Life's mix found on alien world

2009-10-21T05:34:00.000Z

NASA scientists have found the basic ingredients for life in a second giant planet outside our own solar system. The alien world is a so-called "hot Jupiter" made mainly of gas and so could not harbour life as we know it.

But the discovery of the right chemistry boosts chances that life will exist on smaller rocky worlds around the stars.

The planet, orbiting a star called HD 209458 in the constellation of Pegasus, is only the second where the right set of ingredients for life has been detected.

The news comes just a day after European astronomers revealed they have spotted another 32 planets, bringing the total known to over 400.

Researcher Mark Swain of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said: "It's the second planet outside our solar system in which water, methane and carbon dioxide have been found, which are potentially important for biological processes in habitable planets.

"Detecting organic compounds in two exoplanets now raises the possibility that it will become commonplace to find planets with molecules that may be tied to life." He added: "This demonstrates that we can detect the molecules that matter for life processes."

Swain and his team mde observations with two space telescopes, Hubble and Spitzer, to study HD 209458b, a hot, gaseous giant planet bigger than Jupiter that orbits a sun-like star about 150 light years away.

The new finding follows their breakthrough discovery in December 2008 of carbon dioxide around another hot, Jupiter-size planet, HD 189733b. Earlier Hubble and Spitzer observations of that planet had also revealed water vapour and methane.

The detections were made through spectroscopy, which splits light into its components to reveal the distinctive spectral signatures of different chemicals.

Picture: An artist imagines how the giant planet HD 209458b would look. (Credit: JPL/NASA).

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NASA's new rocket is on launchpad

2009-10-21T05:13:00.000Z

NASA has rolled out the brand new rocket that will replace the shuttle and launch men into space. The towering Ares I-X, nicknamed the Stick, is due to make its first £270 million, unmanned test flight next Tuesday, 27 October.

It will blast off from pad 39B - one of the two launch pads used by the shuttles - at the Kennedy Space Centre, Florida.

Standing 310 ft tall, the Ares rocket is nearly twice the height of the shuttle when attached to its fuel tanks. It took nearly eight hours for NASA's giant crawler to carry the vertical rocket the 4.2 miles to the launch pad at a top speed of less than 1 mph. At 800 tons, it weighs almost twice as much as a fully-loaded Boeing 747 jumbo jet.

Astronauts in their Orion capsule will sit on top of the fuel tanks, eliminating the danger of insulation debris hitting the craft. That happened with the Shuttle several times and caused the Columbia disaster in 2003.

Ares has been in development since George W Bush set America on the road back to the moon and then on to Mars. It is part of NASA's Constellation programme. But even as the rocket was preparing for launch, the White House was considering a review panel's proposal to scrap it and go for something cheaper.

President Obama has been told that NASA does not have the funds to reach the moon and should develop a cheaper launcher.

The Shuttle was due to be retired next year but flights are likely to be extended while a decision is made on the Constellation programme. Otherwise NASA will be left in the embarrassing position of relying on Russia to launch its astronauts in their Soyuz rockets.

Picture: The Ares I-X on its journey from the giant Vehicle Assembly Building to the launchpad. (Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett).

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Look out for Halley's Comet debris

2009-10-19T23:25:00.001Z

Amateur astronomers are being promised a celestial treat tonight when the Earth ploughs through a stream of dust left by Halley's Comet. A spectacular display of natural fireworks, called the Orionid meteor shower, will produces many bright shooting stars easy to spot with the naked eye.

Earth crosses the meteors' orbit every October. But this year's shower - which is already active and will continue to produce some meteors for a few days after the maximum night of 20/21 October - could be particularly good for two reasons.

First, it is just three days after new moon, meaning there will be no bright moonlight to drown out the meteors.

But research by Japanese meteor scientists Mikiya Sato and Jun-ichi Watanabe shows that numbers will be higher too because the Earth will run into filaments of meteoroid particles ejected by the comet in 1400 BC and 11 BC. These regions are expected to be rich in bright meteors and a single observer may see up to 30 an hour.

The meteors are called the Orionids because they appear to stream into the atmosphere from a point near the bright star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion the hunter. But they can flash into view anywhere in the sky.

Robin Scagell, of the UK's Society for Popular Astronomy, said yesterday: "The Orionids are one of the strongest meteor displays of the year and will be best seen later in the night as Orion rises higher in the sky.

"You don't need any special equipment to see them. Just wrap up warm and sit in a deckchair away from bright lights and wait!"

• Discover space for yourself and do fun science with a telescope. Here is Skymania's advice on how to choose a telescope. We also have a guide to the different types of telescope available.

©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Planet hunt nets 32 new worlds

2009-10-19T14:09:00.002Z

An amazing haul of 32 new planets was revealed today. The alien worlds orbiting other stars were all discovered by a planet-hunting instrument at the European Southern Observatory 2,400 metres above sea level in Chile's Atacama desert.

The device is fitted to a telescope with a giant "eye" - a mirror 3.6 metres wide (11.8 ft) - to collect light from distant suns. Its long list of new finds was announced at a conference of planet-seeking astronomers at Porto, Portugal, and simultaneously at another astronomical gathering in Madrid.

The detector, called the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), works by watching tiny changes in the spectrum of starlight. These indicate that the star is wobbling as one or more exoplanets that we cannot see directly orbit around it.

The latest discoveries make HARPS the clear leader in planet-hunting. In five years of operation, it has now spotted more than 75 of the 400 or so exoplanets found in alien solar systems.

It has been particularly successful in finding smaller planets only a few times more massive than the Earth, rather than just giant gas worlds called "hot Jupiters".

In fact 24 of the 28 planets known which are less than 20 times the size of Earth have been found with HARPS. Most of these smaller planets have been found in star systems that have a number of planets with up to five per star.

Stéphane Udry, of Geneva Observatory, announced the latest discoveries. He said: "HARPS is a unique, extremely high precision instrument that is ideal for discovering alien worlds. We have now completed our initial five-year programme, which has succeeded well beyond our expectations."

HARPS' success is being challenged by other hunts using NASA's Kepler space telescope and automatic camera surveys on the ground, such as Pan-STARRS and SuperWASP, that watch for dips in starlight, or transits, as planets pass in front of them.

Picture: One of the new planets detected is about six times as massive as the Earth and orbits a star called Gliese 667 C, which belongs to a triple system.Two of the stars can be seen in this artist's impression. (Credit: ESO/L. Calçada).

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Twisted beauty when whirls collide

2009-10-13T09:04:00.001Z

This dramatic image from the Hubble space telescope shows how our own galaxy might look if it were involved in a cosmic collision with a similar city of stars.

Two spiral galaxies that once resembled the Milky Way are twisted and distorted by tidal forces as they crash together.

The result looks like a single, bizarrely shaped galaxy with the hearts of each galaxy almost completely merged and long graceful tails with new stars being born.

Such is the vast distance between stars that the billions of other suns in each galaxy are likely to be sailing past each other with few if any actual impacts taking place.

The double-galaxy, lying about 250 million light-years away in Cancer, the Crab, is labelled NGC 2623 or Arp 243. Astronomers' studies show that massive quantities of gas are pulled from each galaxy towards the centre of the other as they come together.

And with their merger almost complete, long tidal tails of young stars formed in the mix of gas and dust stretch out to reveal the collision has taken place. Around 100 bright star clusters have been found in the prominent lower tail alone.

The collision has also stirred into action a supermassive black hole at the centre of one of the galaxies. As it swallows in a swirling disk of matter, the energy heats the disk up. The result is that the galaxy's nucleus shines brilliantly across a range of wavelengths in the spectrum - it is so bright in the infrared that it is included in a special group of very luminous infrared galaxies by professional scientists.

This remarkable view was produced from images taken in 2007, before Hubble's recent upgrade, using the Advanced Camera for Surveys. It was taken by a team led by US astronomer Aaron S. Evans.

Picture: Hubble's dramatic view of the galaxy merger. Credit: NASA, ESA and A. Evans (Stony Brook University, New York & National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, USA).

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No lunar fireworks as craft crash

2009-10-09T13:36:00.006Z

NASA slammed two spacecraft into the Moon today in a bid to find water - but any lunar fireworks hoped for turned out to be a damp squib.

Astronomers around the world trained telescopes on the Moon to watch for bright flashes and clouds of debris to mark the impacts and saw... nothing.

The space agency confirmed that a two-ton Centaur rocket crashed first at 12.31pm UK time followed four minutes later by its shepherding spacecraft, called LCROSS - the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite.

Instruments aboard the LCROSS probe confirmed that the rocket had blown a fresh hole in a 60-mile-wide crater called Cabeus near the lunar south pole.

But its TV camera revealed NO bright flash and NO sign of any plume of dust - a huge disappointment to thousands of stargazers who gathered for impact parties across the USA.

LCROSS's own crash, at 5,600mph, was a third as powerful as that of the rocket it was following, and there was no visible sign of that either from telescopes on Earth.

One wag asked whether this meant NASA had faked the Moon bombings as well as the Apollo landings. But NASA had warned that the climax of the $79 million mission was likely only to be visible through large telescopes.

NASA scientists will now analyse data from LCROSS and professional observatories to look for the signature of water in the clouds of impact dust that were expected to blow up to 30 miles high.

They hope to find large reservoirs of ice which astronauts could use to drink and make fuel for future exploration of the solar system.

Scentists at mission control at NASA's Ames Research Centre in California were jubilant when their bombing mission happened as planned. And at a press conference, the team said LCROSS's infrared camera had imaged the Centaur impact as a "little white speck." Scientist Anthony Colaprete said: "We actually saw a crater, we measured its temperature."

But there was no disguising the disappointment of stargazers who failed to witness the spectacle they had, perhaps unrealistically, been hoping for.

Picture: A rather fanciful impression of the Centaur crash being watched by LCROSS. (NASA).

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Countdown to bombing raid on Moon

2009-10-08T08:32:00.002Z

NASA is set to make its spectacular bombing raid on the Moon in a new bid to look for precious water. Two space missiles will blast holes in the lunar surface at twice the speed of a bullet tomorrow, Friday 9 October.

Hubble in space plus professional observatories around the world will watch as the twin impacts occur shortly after 11.30 UT (7.30am EDT) - check the NASA countdown clock here.

First a two-ton Centaur rocket stage will crash at 5,600mph into a 60-mile wide crater called Cabeus near the lunar south pole at 1.31 UT (7.31am EDT).

It will blast its own small crater creating a bright flash and a plume of debris 30 miles high.

Four minutes later, the mission's shepherding spacecraft, called LCROSS, will fly through the dust cloud to analyse it before colliding with the Moon too, creating a second plume.

Though the Moon is drier than any desert, space scientists believe ice dumped by comets could be trapped in permanently shadowed craters that have not seen sunlight for billions of years. If so they could provide vital water supplies for a manned moonbase, both to drink and be turned into fuel.

NASA say the Centaur impact will produce a crater about 20 yards wide and as deep as a swimming pool. It will have less effect on the Moon than a mosquito hitting a jumbo jet.

NASA will broadcast live coverage of the impacts, including images from space and the University of Hawaii's 88-inch telescope on Mauna Kea. The space agency is also organising impact parties. And hundreds of stargazers' backyard telescopes across the world will be watching the waning gibbous Moon for the impact blasts.

They will not be visible from the UK or Europe unfortunately as it will be daylight plus the Moon will be close to or below the horizon.

The LCROSS mission - it stands for Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite - launched in June together with another spacecraft, called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The orbiter is still circling the Moon searching for potential landing sites for astronauts when they return there in the next decade.

Last month, NASA sensationally announced that three moon probes had confirmed that water is spread widely across the Moon. Yesterday they revealed that lunar colonists should be possible to extract it by simply adapting a microwave oven to produce and collect water vapour.

Ed Ethridge of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre said: "No magic, just microwaves. We're showing how microwaves can extract water from moondust by heating it from the inside out.

"We believe we can use microwave heating to cause the water ice in a lunar permafrost layer to turn into water vapour. This can be collected and then condensed into liquid water. Best of all, microwave extraction can be done on the spot. And it requires no excavation - no heavy equipment for drilling into the hard-frozen lunar surface."

Top picture: An artist's impression of the Centaur rocket stage and LCROSS heading for impact with the Moon. (NASA). Bottom: A photograph showing the location of the crater Cabeus by UK amateur Jamie Cooper.

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©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Asteroid impact danger diminishes

2009-10-07T20:20:00.002Z

Fears of Armageddon receded further today after NASA scientists refined calculations of the path of a threatening asteroid. A giant space rock called Apophis is due to make two close approaches to Earth within the next 30 years.

The first, on Friday the 13th of April, 2029, is virtually certain to miss us though it will come closer than TV and other geostationary satellites, at a distance of only 18,300 miles.

But uncertainty over the effect of that close encounter meant that astronomers could not rule out the chance of an impact seven years later in 2036. There were some imaginative ideas to avoid this happening.

Now, however, the chance of a catastrophic collision on 13 April of that year have dropped from one-in-45,000 to an even more reassuring one-in-250,000.

Apophis is 300 yards wide and weighs 25 million tons. It was only discovered in December 2004.

If it struck, it would hit Earth with a force equivalent to 880 megatons - around 65,500 times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima - which is why scientists have taken it so seriously.

The new calculations were carried out by specialists Steve Chesley and Paul Chodas at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. They are due to present their latest findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Puerto Rico tomorrow.

They based their figures on photographs of Apophis made by astronomers using telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, together with other data from Kitt Peak, Arizona, and Arecibo, Puerto Pico. Hundreds of images were analysed to refine the asteroid's position and produce a path into the late part of the century.

Hawaii asteroid hunter Dr David Tholen helped analyse the images. He said: "Our new orbit solution shows that Apophis will miss Earth’s surface in 2036 by a scant 20,270 miles, give or take 125 miles. That’s slightly closer to Earth than most of our communications and weather satellites."

As well as showing the reduced likelihood of an impact in 2036, the analysis revealed that Apophis will make another close encounter in 2068, although once more it is unlikely to present a danger.

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Saturn's biggest ring is out of hiding

2009-10-07T08:08:00.003Z

Saturn is famous for the spectacular collection of rings that encircle it. But the biggest has gone completely unnoticed - until now. That is because the band of cool dust and ice particles is too faint to be seen in normal light.

It only revealed its presence when the infrared eye of NASA's Spitzer space telescope was turned on the planet.

Unlike the other thin but bright rings that may be seen in the smallest of telescopes, the new ring is vast - so big, in fact, that you could fit a billion Earths inside it.

It is 20 times thicker than gas giant Saturn is wide. And the new band's own width is around 12 million km (7.4 million miles).

It is also tilted at and angle of 27° to the other rings and lies far beyond them - the inner edge only begins about 6 million km (3.7 million miles) from the planet.

Astronomer Anne Verbiscer, of the University of Virginia, said: "This is one supersized ring. If you could see the ring, it would span the width of two full moons' worth of sky, one on either side of Saturn."

One of Saturn's most distant moons, 230km-wide Phoebe, orbits the planet within the new ring. Its impacts with asteroids are thought to have supplied the dust that formed it.

The new ring may also solve a long-standing mystery concerning another of Saturn's moons, Iapetus. The 1,500km-wide satellite has one side much darker than the other, making it vary in brightness by two magnitudes.

Scientists say that this dark side, named Cassini Regio after the moon's 17th-century discoverer Giovanni Cassini, is caused by a stream of dust from the new ring hitting it like flies slamming into a car's windscreen.

Its discovery is revealed this week in the journal Nature.

A co-discoverer of the new ring, Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, said: "Astronomers have long suspected that there is a connection between Saturn's outer moon Phoebe and the dark material on Iapetus. This new ring provides convincing evidence of that relationship."

A spaceprobe, also named after Cassini, is currently orbiting Saturn and returning a host of great findings about the planet and its many moons and rings.

The ring discovery is just the latest triumph for the Spitzer space telescope which has also detected a cosmic collision, newly forming solar systems and hints that Star Trek Spock's planet Vulcan could really exist.

Pictures: The images show an impression of the enormous new ring and a labelled explanation of its layout. (NASA).

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Invisible clouds burst with new stars

2009-10-02T12:41:00.000Z

These swirling clouds show part of our own galaxy as we can never see it directly with our eyes - and astronomers are surprised by the intense activity it reveals.

The view, from Europe's new Herschel space telescope, picks out a reservoir of cold gas in the constellation of Crux, the Southern Cross, that is bursting with newly-forming stars.

The image reveals material as it would appear if our eyes were tuned into infrared wavelengths rather than visible light. It was produced by combining scans from two cameras aboard Herschel, the biggest telescope in space, which was launched in May.

The instruments - the Spectral and Photometric Imaging REceiver (SPIRE), and the Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) - were aimed at an area in the plane of the Milky Way about 60° from its centre. It covers around 16 times the area of the Full Moon as seen in the sky.

They discovered a region in complete turmoil. Herschel peered through the glow of the dust to spot a structure of long filaments of gas with stars forming on them like pearls on string.

The new pictures were made on 3 September during the first trial run with the two instruments working together. Herschel will go on to survey large areas of our galaxy.

SPIRE Principal Investigator is Professor Matt Griffin, of Cardiff University. He said: "We had high hopes for this kind of observation with Herschel, using the combined power of the two cameras to see the galaxy as never before.

"It's great to see that the observations work so well from a technical point of view, and that the scientific results are so spectacular. It appears that star formation in the galaxy is a very turbulent process."

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Shields down! Cosmic rays at a high

2009-10-01T08:33:00.001Z

Earth is being bombarded by powerful cosmic rays from deep in the galaxy because the Sun's natural shields are down, NASA reports.

The level of space radiation is nearly a fifth higher this year than at any time since the dawn of the space age 50 years ago.

The tiny, energetic, sub-atomic particles – smaller than atoms but flying at close to the speed of light – can pass completely through solid objects. They are released by massive explosions such as exploding stars called supernovae.

Usually the solar wind – a stream of energy from the sun – together with its magnetic field act like a bubble called the heliosphere around the solar system to protect planets from much of the bombardment. But activity on the sun is at its weakest for around a century, weakening this protective shield.

The Earth has its own natural shield too – our own magnetic field helps deflect radiation from space and experts insist that there is no danger from the rise in cosmic rays.

But if they remain at a high level, it would be a real hazard for astronauts embarking on a mission to Mars. Space engineers would need to provide plenty of physical shielding on their spacecraft to protect them from potentially deadly doses of radiation.

The soaring numbers of cosmic rays were detected by instruments aboard NASA 's unmanned Advanced Composition Explorer spacecraft from a position nearly a million miles away between Earth and the sun.

Richard Mewaldt, of the Californian Institute of Technology, says the stage is set for "a perfect storm of cosmic rays." He added: "In 2009, cosmic ray intensities have increased 19% beyond anything we've seen in the past 50 years. The increase is significant, and it could mean we need to re-think how much radiation shielding astronauts take with them on deep-space missions."

Read NASA's report here.

Picture: A diagram illustrating how the heliophere acts like a protective bubble around the solar system. (Credit: NASA).

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Water galore on Moon and Mars

2009-09-24T20:11:00.002Z

Two major discoveries revealed today may have made it a lot easier for humans to leave Earth and establish new colonies on the Moon and Mars.

In a sensational announcement, NASA announced that there are vast quantities of water on the Moon, which has always been considered an arid world.

A second discovery revealed that water ice exists at mid-latitudes on Mars. This is much further from the poles and closer to the equator than water was previously thought to lie and means there should be supplies for human explorers to drink.

The new martian ice was detected by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe which spotted the ice in craters produced by recent meteorite impacts on the red planet.

The discovery delighted space scientists still reeling from the revelation that water is widespread on the Moon. There are no lakes or rivers -the lunar soil, or regolith, is still drier than any desert on Earth.

But the evidence from three space probes shows that as much as a liter (or quart) or water could be extracted from every tonne (ton) of dirt.

That may not sound much. Indeed, water would still be an extremely precious commodity. But processing plants would be able to produce enough water to maintain a colony on the Moon without the far more costly option of delivering water in blocks of ice from Earth.

Apart from giving lunar colonists water to drink, the supplies could irrigate plants in special greenhouses growing vegetables for the humans to eat. Evidence suggests that lunar soil would supply the nutrients needed for some plants.

European Space Agency scientist Bernard Foing led a team that discovered that marigolds are suited to growing in lunar soil without extra nutrients. Russian scientists have discovered that certain vegetables can survive the lunar cycle of much longer days and nights.

But lunar gardeners could also use artificial light to produce a familiar day-night rhythm for vegetables being grown for the first human colonists.

The existence of water molecules was revealed by a sensitive NASA spectrometer aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 probe to the Moon. This produced a colour map of the surface indicating the chemical make-up.

The result showed the presence of both water and a closely related molecule called hydroxyl, which contains just one atom of hydrogen to an atom of oxygen, all over the Moon’s surface.

The water is believed to be produced when a radiation from the Sun, called the solar wind, batters the Moon. This contains hydrogen which reacts with oxygen in the lunar rocks.

The Indian probe's findings confirmed results previously indicated by two NASA missions that glanced at the Moon as they flew past to other targets - Cassini and Deep Impact.

It had been thought that some water ice might be trapped in the eternal shadows of some craters near the Moon's south pole. On October 9, a NASA probe, called LCROSS, will bomb the moon, near its south pole, to look for more signs of the lunar water in the blast debris.

As space scientists celebrated the discovery of water on the Moon, NASA announced that there is much more of it on Mars too.

An orbiting probe has revealed that water ice exists at mid-latitudes on the Red Planet. This is much further from the poles and closer to the equator than water was previously thought to lie.

It means there should be ample supplies for human explorers to tap into wherever they land.

The new martian ice was detected by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe. Its HiRise camera spotted it shining brightly in craters up to 8ft deep produced by recent meteorite impacts on the red planet. Scientists were amazed at how pure it turned out to be. The ice swiftly evaporated - or more correctly sublimated - after being exposed to the thin martian air.

Investigator Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona said: "“We knew there was ice below the surface at high latitudes of Mars, but we find that it extends far closer to the equator than you would think, based on Mars’ climate today.

”This ice is a relic of a more humid climate from perhaps just several thousand years ago."

Picture: Two HiRise images show how water ice exposed by recent meteor impact swiftly vaporised. (Credit: NASA).

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Solid evidence for Earthlike world

2009-09-16T08:16:00.000Z

European astronomers have found the first solid evidence for a rocky planet outside our own solar system, they revealed today. Observations have confirmed that the new world, dubbed Corot-7b, is the most Earthlike yet found.

It is less than twice the diameter of our own planet and has a similar density.

But there the resemblance ends. Corot-7b lies so close to its own sun that its surface must be like a vision of hell. Temperatures soar above 2,000 degrees on its day side and sink to minus 200 degrees on the night side.

It means the surface could be covered with molten lava or boiling oceans and it certainly could not hold any form of life as we know it.

Corot-7b is 23 times closer to its parent star than inner planet Mercury is to our own sun, and it zips around it at 750,000 km per hour making its year – the time it takes to complete one orbit - just 3 days 17 hours long.

Didier Queloz, leader of the European team that made the observations from the European Southern Observatory in Chile, said: "This is science at its thrilling and amazing best. We did everything we could to learn what the object discovered by the CoRoT satellite looks like and we found a unique system."

The Earthlike world was detected in February 2009 by a planet-hunting spaceprobe called Corot. It was spotted around an otherwise unremarkable star named TYC 4799-1733-1 in the constellation of Monoceros, the Unicorn, about 500 light-years away. The star is slightly smaller and cooler than our own sun and only about 1.5 billion years old.

Corot detected the planet by spotting a dip in starlight when it passed in front of its own sun ocne every orbit. To obtain precise data to reveal the planet's nature they used a device called the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph attached to the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

The studies also disclose that a second super-Earth lies in the same alien solar system . It does not pass in front of the star but made its presence known by its gravitational pull. It circles its host star in 3 days and 17 hours and has a mass or “weight”, about eight times that of Earth.

Picture: An artist's impression of the Earthlike world close to its parent star. (Credit: ESO).

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Squashed plutoid has a red spot

2009-09-16T01:01:00.001Z

One of the newly discovered dwarf worlds that got Pluto kicked out of the major planets club is sporting a distinct spot, scientists have discovered.

Icy plutoid Haumea has a red blotch that appears to be richer in minerals and organic materials than the surrounding surface. It could mark the location of an impact in relatively recent times.

Haumea, discovered by Mike Brown of Caltech in 2004, and named after the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth, is unusual because of its squashed ovoid shape. This is caused by its rapid spin – it makes one rotation in a little under four Earth hours.

The fast spin is also put down to an impact by another body such as a large asteroid around a billion years ago. The zone that Haumea inhabits, called the Kuiper Belt, is thought to be swarming with millions of small icy bodies. A NASA probe, New Horizons, is racing to visit the region out beyond Neptune.

Haumea seems to have captured two of them as moons – the plutoid was discovered by Brown's team to have two tiny satellites, now called Hi'iaka and Namaka, in 2005.

The plutoid's “great red spot” was discovered by measuring the dwarf planet's change in brightness as it rotated. There was a clear light-curve which appeared different at different wavelengths, leading discoverer Dr Pedro Lacerda to deduce its colour.

Dr Lacerda, who is Newton Fellow at Queen's University Belfast, will present his findings at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam today.

He said: “Our very first measurements of Haumea told us there was a spot on the surface. The two brightness maxima and the two minima of the light-curve are not exactly equal, as would be expected from a uniform surface. This indicates the presence of a dark spot on the otherwise bright surface.

“But Haumea’s light curve has told us more and it was only when we got the infrared data that were we able to begin to understand what the spot might be.”

The spot's colour may show that it is richer in minerals and organic compounds, or that it contains a higher fraction of crystalline ice. If it does mark the scar from an impact, then the material detected might be like that the impacting body was made of, possibly mixed with material from beneath Haumea's icy surface.

Haumea is the fourth largest known plutoid, or Kuiper belt object, after Eris, Pluto and Makemake. It measures 1,250 miles (2,000 km) by 1,000 miles (1,600 km) by 625 miles (1,000 km). The way it spins tells us this is a rocky world beneath the ice.

Astronomers now plan to use the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile in 2010 to make detailed spectroscopic observations to try to identify the spot further and work out how it originated.

The plutoids are too distant to get detailed images of them. This is said to be the best picture of Pluto from Earth - it is said to be better than an image taken by the Hubble space telescope.

Picture: Part of a computer model showing how the red spot appears on Haumea. ( Credit: P Lacerda).

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Record storm is raging on Saturn

2009-09-15T05:40:00.002Z

Space scientists have been watching the longest continuously observed thunderstorm in the solar system raging on planet Saturn.

The powerful storm, complete with lightning 10,000 times more powerful than on Earth, began in mid-January 2009 and is still going strong eight months later.

Such storms are clearly regular events. The new record breaks a previous one set by a storm which lasted from November 2007 to July 2008, lasting 7.5 months. Amateur astronomers helped monitor that storm through their backyard telescopes.

Both were spotted and monitored by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in orbit around the giant ringed world. Who knows how long storms have lasted in the years before Cassini's arrival at Saturn in 2004.

The current thunderstorm on Saturn is the ninth to be observed since then. Scientists are able to listen in to very powerful radio waves emitted by the lightning flashes using the antennas and receivers of the Cassini Radio and Plasma Wave Science instrument.

The radio waves are about 10,000 times stronger than their terrestrial counterparts and originate from huge thunderstorms in Saturn's atmosphere with diameters around 3,000 km, Dr Georg Fischer of the Austrian Academy of Sciences will tell the European Planetary Science Congress today in Potsdam, Germany.

Dr Fischer said: “These lightning storms are not only astonishing for their power and longevity, the radio waves that they emit are also useful for studying Saturn's ionosphere, the charged layer that surrounds the planet a few thousand kilometres above the cloud tops.”

The observations of Saturn lightning using the Cassini RPWS instrument are being carried out by an international team of scientists from Austria, the US and France. Results have confirmed previous studies of the Voyager spacecraft indicating that levels of ionisation are approximately 100 times higher on the day-side than the night side of Saturn’s ionosphere.

As we reported last month, torrential rain has also been spotted on Saturn's amazing moon Titan.

Picture: Saturn's moon Tethys sits quietly above the planet as a train of earlier storms rumbles through the its southern hemisphere in July 2008. (Credit: NASA).

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Champagne supernova for Tom

2009-09-04T10:57:00.008Z

A British amateur astronomer has broken a 36-year-old record for the number of exploding stars discovered by one person. Retired telecoms engineer Tom Boles, of Coddenham, Suffolk, has photographed and identified 125 supernovae erupting in distant galaxies from his private observatory.

The previous record was held by a professional scientist, Bulgarian-born Professor Fritz Zwicky, who studied the size and age of the universe at the California Insitute of Technology. He found 121 of the suicidal stars before his death in 1974.

Tom, 65, a former president of the British Astronomical Association, operates three computer-controlled telescopes from his countryside site which is unhampered by light pollution. He has been searching for supernovae since 1996 and monitors 12,000 galaxies, working every clear night.

Tom told Skymania News: I hadn't really appreciated the significance of the achievement when it happened. I was aware of Zwicky's tally but not that it held any other significance than that it was the achievement of a great man. He died a year after his final discovery. Had he lived longer his tally would no doubt have been much greater.

"The greater part of my achievement comes from the fact that it was done from the UK with its poor, damp, irregular and difficult to predict weather conditions.

"Also, unlike the larger professional efforts of Zwicky, the funding for the effort was entirely private. Around half a million images have been taken to make the discoveries and so accruing over 300,000 hours observing time."

Supernova discoveries are important to professional astronomers because Type IA blasts can help give precise distances for galaxies and so help to determine the size of the universe. They have been detected by professionals as far away as 11 billion light-years. You can read more about Tom's observatory and equipment here.

Skymania News told last night of a new Galaxy Zoo project to allow computer users to detect supernovae even if they haven't got a telescope!

Picture: This CCD photo by Tom Boles reevals one of the supernovae he found this year, SN2009es in the galaxy IC 1525. It was discovered at magnitude 17.7 on May 24. (Credit: Tom Boles).

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Planet-hunter will find alien moons

2009-09-03T16:27:00.005Z

A planet-seeking spacecraft launched in March is so powerful that it will even detect habitable moons around alien worlds, UK scientists said today.

NASA's $595 million Kepler mission is flying through space checking out 100,000 stars looking for other planets resembling Earth.

Its instruments scan the light of stars in one small region of the Milky Way, watching for little blips revealing that a planet is passing in front of one of them.

Now a team led by Dr David Kipping of University College London says they may even find habitable moons too. They will be able to support alien life if they live in the "Goldilocks zone" around a star where conditions are not too hot or cold but just right.

Dr Kipping, who believed that many thousands or even millions of these moons exist in the galaxy, has devised a way to discover them by looking for a wobble in the planet that each is orbiting, due to its gravitational pull. The new research shows that Kepler's telescope will be powerful enough to spot the changes in the planet's position and velocity.

An alien solar system's moon - dubbed an exomoon - will be easiest to detect if it is orbiting a fluffy planet like Saturn, say the scientists, rather than a more dense or solid world. This is because Saturn's lightness would make it wobble much more than a heavy planet.

If the Saturn-like planet is at the right distance from its star, then the temperature will allow liquid water to be stable on any sufficiently large moons in orbit around it and these could then be habitable.

The team found that moons as small as a fifth the weight of the Earth should be easily detectable with the Kepler spaceprobe around 25,000 stars up to 500 light-years away from Earth.

Star Wars fans are already wondering if Kepler might find planetary satellites like the fabled Forested Moon of Endor, the planet that was home to the Ewoks.

Dr Kipping said: "For the first time, we have demonstrated that potentially habitable moons up to hundreds of light years away may be detected with current instrumentation.

"As we ran the simulations, even we were surprised that moons as small as one-fifth of the Earth's mass could be spotted. It seems probable that many thousands, possibly millions, of habitable exomoons exist in the Galaxy and now we can start to look for them."

The team's findings will be published by the Royal Astronomical Society. Last month, Skymania News told how Kepler had detected the phases of an extrasolar planet.

Picture: Artist Dan Durda's impression of the scne from a moon orbiting an extrasolar planet. (Credit: Dan Durda, Southwest Research Institute).

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