On 17 March the ESA Council, at its meeting in Paris, unanimously approved a cooperation agreement between ESA and the Indian Space Research Organisation for India’s first moon mission – Chandrayaan-1.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), founded in 1969, launched its first satellite in 1975. Since then it has developed a number of launch vehicles as well as satellites for Earth observation, remote sensing, telecommunications and weather forecasting. India has its own
Researchers working on the room temperature spintronics (SPIN) research project are the first in Europe to successfully produce GaMnN layers, which are ferromagnetic at room temperature. The layer properties were examined using electric, optic, x-ray and positron measurements. The Academy-funded SPIN project is comprised of four participating entities, i.e. the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) Departments of Electron Physics, Optoelectronics and Physics laboratories and the VTT Tech
Lord Sainsbury, UK Minister for Science and Innovation will officially open the University of Dundee’s new Space Technology Centre that will carry out advanced research into planetary landing simulators and develop support technology for many space missions.
Opening on Friday 18 March the Space Technology Centre comprises the NERC Satellite Receiving Station at Dundee, The Space Systems Research Group and commercialisation activities including spin-out company STAR-Dundee.
This image, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, shows flow features most likely formed by glaciers or ‘block’ glaciers.
This unusual ‘hourglass’-shaped structure is located in Promethei Terra at the eastern rim of the Hellas Basin, at about latitude 38º South and longitude 104º East. A so-called ‘block’ glacier, an ice stream with a large amount of scree (small rocks of assorted sizes), flowed from a flank of the massif into a
Italian, US cosmologists present alternate explanation for accelerating expansion of the universe
Why is the universe expanding at an accelerating rate, spreading its contents over ever greater dimensions of space? An original solution to this puzzle, certainly the most fascinating question in modern cosmology, was put forward by four theoretical physicists, Edward W. Kolb of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Chicago (USA): Sabino Matarrese of the
The Cassini spacecraft’s two flybys of the icy moon Enceladus have revealed that the moon has a significant atmosphere. Scientists using Cassini’s magnetometer instrument for their studies, say the source may be due to volcanism, geysers, or gases escaping from the surface or its interior.
When the Cassini had its first encounter with Enceladus on 17th February 2005 at an altitude of 1,167 kilometres (725 miles), the magnetometer instrument saw a striking signature in the ma
Astrophysicists in recent years have found evidence for a force they call dark energy in observations from the farthest reaches of the universe, billions of light years away.
Now an international team of researchers has used data from powerful computer models, supported by observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, to find evidence of dark energy right in our own cosmic neighborhood.
The data paint a picture of the universe as a virtual sea of dark energy, with billi
On the basis of stellar spectra totalling more than 200 hours of effective exposure time with the 8.2-m VLT Kueyen telescope at Paranal (Chile), a team of astronomers [1] has made a surprising discovery about the stars in the giant southern globular cluster Omega Centauri.
It has been known for some time that, contrary to other clusters of this type, this stellar cluster harbours two different populations of stars that still burn hydrogen in their centres. One population, accou
There are just under three years to go to the first launch of a new European launcher – Vega. Last week representatives of over 20 European space industries met at ESA’s European Space Research Institute, ESRIN, just outside Rome in Italy, to discuss progress on this new small-scale launcher.
“The preliminary project stage is now completed,” said Stefano Bianchi, responsible of the Launch Vehicle Development Programme. “We are now moving from the drawing board to the construction
Neutrinos released in Switzerland are due to be caught in Italy under the international project OPERA. The system of detectors for identifying these mysterious particles is developed by a joint effort of Russian and Ukrainian scientists.
Specialists from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna, Russia) and Institute of Scintillator Materials NASU (Kharkov, Ukraine) have joined the Project OPERA that is a biggest and most expensive international experiment in the field
World’s Largest Interferometer with Moving Optical Telescopes on Track
The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at Paranal Observatory has just seen another extension of its already impressive capabilities by combining interferometrically the light from two relocatable 1.8-m Auxiliary Telescopes.
Following the installation of the first Auxiliary Telescope (AT) in January 2004 (see ESO PR 01/04), the second AT arrived at the VLT platform by the end of 2004.
Black holes have a reputation for voraciously eating everything in their immediate neighborhood, but these large gravity wells also affect electromagnetic radiation and may hinder our ability to ever locate the center of the universe, according to an international research team.
“Any attempt to discover what was happening a long time ago at the beginning of our universe must take into account what gravitationally assisted negative refraction does to the radiation being viewed,” say
Saturn’s hazy largest moon, Titan – a body long held to be a frozen analog of early Earth – has a surface shaped largely by an Earth-like interplay of tectonics, erosion by fluids, winds, and perhaps volcanism. So reports the Cassini imaging team in today’s issue of Nature, in their first published presentation of findings from images of Titan gathered since last July.
Titan is about the same size and density as Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede. Unlike Ganymede, though, it proba
The dynamic atmosphere of Saturn’s haze-enshrouded moon Titan is revealed in the first Cassini Imaging Team report on Titan, to appear in the March 10 issue of Nature.
Imaging scientists, analyzing images of Titan designed to allow views of the surface and lower atmosphere, have discovered that the winds on Titan blow a lot faster than the moon rotates. In contrast, the jet stream of Earth blows a lot slower than the surface of our planet moves.
Titan is a particularly sl
University of Arkansas researchers have witnessed the birth of a quantum dot and learned more about how such atomic islands form and grow, using the ultrahigh vacuum facility on campus. This information will help researchers better understand and use materials that could lead to small, efficient and powerful computers, communication devices and scientific instruments.
Seongho Cho, Zhiming Wang, and Gregory Salamo report their findings in the upcoming issue of the journal Applie
Pacific Northwest National Lab experiments point to clingy grains of ice to solve age-old mystery of how primordial dust pulled together to form planets
How dust specks in the early solar systems came together to become planets has vexed astronomers for years. Gravity, always an attractive candidate to explain how celestial matter pulls together, was no match for stellar winds. The dust needed help coming together fast, in kilometer-wide protoplanets, in the first few million y
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