Scientists around the world eagerly await the arrival of sample particles from Comet Wild 2, which are being brought back to Earth by the US Stardust spacecraft on 15 January this year.

The NASA Stardust mission was launched over seven years ago and has travelled several thousand millions of kilometres in deep space, chasing Comet Wild 2.

In January 2004, the spacecraft encountered the comet to collect samples of particles ejected from its nucleus.

This was ac

The GIOVE-A satellite is in good health and started transmitting the first Galileo signals from medium Earth orbit on 12 January.

GIOVE-A was placed in orbit (altitude 23,260 km) by a Soyuz-Fregat rocket operated by Starsem on 28 December last from the Baikonur cosmodrome. The prime contractor, Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, then successfully deployed the 7-metre solar array panels, commissioned the satellite platform and prepared the payload for tests from its Mission Contro

Team improves infinitesimal rings for speedy, reliable, efficient magnetic memory

Imagine a computer that doesn’t lose data even in a sudden power outage, or a coin-sized hard drive that could store 100 or more movies.

Magnetic random-access memory, or MRAM, could make these possible, and would also offer numerous other advantages. It would, for instance, operate at much faster than the speed of ordinary memory but consume 99 percent less energy.

The

Astronomers announced yesterday (Thursday, Jan. 12) what may be the first discovery of a helical magnetic field in interstellar space, coiled like a snake around a gas cloud in the constellation of Orion.

“You can think of this structure as a giant, magnetic Slinky wrapped around a long, finger-like interstellar cloud,’’ said Timothy Robishaw, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. “The magnetic field lines are like stretched rubber ba

A tiny galaxy has given astronomers a glimpse of a time when the first bright objects in the universe formed, ending the dark ages that followed the birth of the universe.

Astronomers from Sweden, Spain and the Johns Hopkins University used NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellite to make the first direct measurement of ionizing radiation leaking from a dwarf galaxy undergoing a burst of star formation. The result, which has ramifications for understandin

A team of astronomers is announcing today that they have discovered a giant Milky Way-sized tunnel filled with high energy particles in a distant galaxy cluster. These new findings are of special interest to astronomers as they may provide the missing evolutionary link necessary to understand the cycle of birth and death, as well as the environmental impact, of radio jets which result from ravenous supermassive black holes within giant galaxies. The report is being presented to the American Ast

“Play” or back-and-forth dialogue between users and designers can lead to IT systems that are more responsive to the subtleties and ambiguities of users’ different perspectives, say Penn State researchers.

And because it makes users and designers teammates during the development process, the “play” model also can reduce the multiple upgrades and updates that plague enterprise-wide or “Newspeak” solutions, says Frederico Fonseca, assistant professor in the School of Informati

Before the end of January particles from a distant comet will be delivered to The Open University and research will begin on what could be keys to the origin of life in the universe.

NASA’s Stardust mission is returning to Earth early January 15th after a three billion-mile (4.6 billion-km) trip to collect interstellar comet dust from Comet Wild 2 (pronounced vilt after the Swiss man who discovered it). During a brief encounter with Comet Wild 2 nearly two years ago, Stardust ca

In one of the most detailed astronomical images ever produced, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is offering an unprecedented look at the Orion Nebula. This turbulent star-formation region is one of astronomy’s most dramatic and photogenic celestial objects.

The crisp image reveals a tapestry of star formation, from the dense pillars of gas and dust that may be the homes of fledgling stars to the hot, young, massive stars that have emerged from their gas-and-dust cocoons and are s

The European Space Agency and the Australian National University have successfully tested a new design of spacecraft ion engine that dramatically improves performance over present thrusters and marks a major step forward in space propulsion capability.

Ion engines are a form of electric propulsion and work by accelerating a beam of positively charged particles (or ions) away from the spacecraft using an electric field. ESA is currently using electric propulsion on its Moon mission,

Black and white reproductions of Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” lack the beauty and depth of the original oil painting. In a similar fashion, images of stars and galaxies composed of a single wavelength band cannot convey the wealth of information now accessible to astronomers.

In recent years, a number of ground-based optical and radio surveys of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — Earth’s nearest neighboring galaxies — have become available. New composite

An international team of astronomers today announced the first results from the Radial Velocity Experiment, an ambitious all-sky spectroscopic survey aimed at measuring the speed, temperature, surface gravity and composition of up to a million stars passing near the sun.

Those first results from the project, known for short as RAVE, confirm that dark matter dominates the total mass of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, team members at The Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere sa

Astronomers have discovered a planet orbiting a very young star nearly 100 light years away using a relatively small, publicly accessible telescope turbocharged with a new planet-finding instrument.

The feat suggests that astronomers have found a way to dramatically accelerate the pace of the hunt for planets outside our solar system.

“In the last two decades, astronomers have searched about 3,000 stars for new planets,” said Jian Ge, a professor of astronomy at the Uni

The European Commission, Directorate General for Education and Culture, congratulates Umeå University on the award of ICT-LEAP project, coordinated by Dr. Adi Anani. The project assists MEDA partners in accessing EU e-education technologies and opportunities.

The European Commission Head of Unit, Tempus – Erasmus Mundus, Mr. Augusto González, has warmly congratulated the successful application ICT-LEAP, Information and Communication Technologies Learning Pentagram. Apart from

This Sunday morning (15th January) at 10.12 am GMT a capsule containing dust from Comet Wild 2 will return to Earth landing in the Utah Desert near Salt Lake City. The landing of the capsule marks the return of NASA’s Stardust mission which has been on a three billion-mile trip to collect pristine cometary material and interstellar dust. After their collection samples will be distributed to a limited number of specialist research teams. Four UK institutions have been invited to be part of the

Algorithms and programs being developed by scientists from the Moscow Physics Engineering Institute and the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics RAS with the support of the International Science and Technology Centre will help oncologists to accurately and rapidly calculate an optimal dose of radiation. Then, they will be able to determine the direction and intensity of radioactive flows so as to have maximum harmful effect on the tumour with minimum irradiation of healthy tissue, and all