ESA’s SMART-1 captured its first close-range images of the Moon this January, during a sequence of test lunar observations from an altitude between 1000 and 5000 kilometres above the lunar surface.
SMART-1 entered its first orbit around the Moon on 15 November 2004. It has spent the two months following spiralling down to the Moon and testing its array of instruments.
The first four days after being captured by the lunar gravity were very critical. There had been
Carbon nanotubes—a hot nanotechnology with many potential uses—may find one of its quickest applications in the next generation of standards for optical power measurements, which are essential for laser systems used in manufacturing, medicine, communications, lithography, space-based sensors and other technologies.
As described in a forthcoming paper in Applied Optics,* scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Renewable Energy
A key process that enhances the production of nuclear energy in the interior of dense stars has been re-created in the laboratory for the first time by physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The work may help scientists study topics such as nuclear fusion as a possible energy source and demonstrates a new method for studying and modeling dense stellar objects such as white dwarfs.
The NIST experiments, described in the Jan. 18 issue of Physical Revi
Clear evidence in a Chinese meteorite for the past presence of chlorine-36, a short-lived radioactive isotope, lends further support to the controversial concept that a nearby supernova blast was involved in the formation of our solar system, according to a report forthcoming in the February 1 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (to be published online today).
Known as the Ningqiang carbonaceous chondrite, the primitive meteorite is a space relic that fo
These images from the Huygens DISR instrument show new features, such as evidence of flow around ’islands’, deposits of water ice and channels which could have been created by methane springs.
On 14 January ESA’s Huygens probe made an historic first ever descent to the surface of Titan, 1.2 billion kilometres from Earth and the largest of Saturn’s moons. Huygens travelled to Titan as part of the joint ESA/NASA/ASI Cassini-Huygens mission. Starting at about 150 kilometres altitude, six multi-function instruments on board Huygens recorded data during the descent and on the surface. The first scientific assessments of Huygens’ data were presented during a press conference
Further insights into Titan were unveiled today (21st January 2005) as scientists involved in the joint NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens mission presented further results and images a week to the day after the successful descent and arrival of the Huygens probe on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon.
Principal Investigator for the Huygens Surface Science Package [SSP], Professor John Zarnecki from the Open University, Milton Keynes, has spent the last week with his team analysing and
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Technical University Munch have discovered evidence of a phenomenon that may lead to drastically lowering the cost of manufacturing of materials from plastics to fertilizers. Studying nano-sized clusters of gold on a magnesium oxide surface, scientists found direct evidence for electrical charging of a nano-sized catalyst. This is an important factor in increasing the rate of chemical reactions. The research will appear in the 21 January, 2
Although mass is the most important property of stars, it has proved very hard to measure for the lowest mass objects in the universe. Thanks to a powerful new camera, a very rare, low-mass companion has finally been photographed.
The discovery suggests that, due to errors in the models, astronomers have overestimated the number of young “brown dwarfs” and “free floating” extrasolar planets. An international team of astronomers lead by University of Arizona Associate Professor La
VLT Finds Young, Very Low Mass Objects Are Twice As Heavy As Predicted
Thanks to the powerful new high-contrast camera installed at the Very Large Telescope, photos have been obtained of a low-mass companion very close to a star. This has allowed astronomers to measure directly the mass of a young, very low mass object for the first time.
The object, more than 100 times fainter than its host star, is still 93 times as massive as Jupiter. And it appears to be almost twice
Although Huygens landed on Titan’s surface on 14 January, activity at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, continues at a furious pace. Scientists are still working to refine the exact location of the probe’s landing site, seen above.
While Huygens rests frozen at -180 degrees Celsius on Titan’s landscape, a symbolic finale to the engineering and flight phase of this historic mission, scientists have taken little time off to eat or sleep. They have
One week after the successful completion of Huygens’ mission to the atmosphere and surface of Titan, the largest and most mysterious moon of Saturn, the European Space Agency is bringing together some of the probe’s scientists to present and discuss the first results obtained from the data collected by the instruments.
After a 4000 million kilometre journey through the Solar System that lasted almost seven years, the Huygens probe plunged into the hazy atmosphere of Titan at 11
For decades, scientists have observed that Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo, spins much faster than the sun. But thanks to a powerful new telescopic array, astronomers now know with unprecedented clarity what that means to this massive celestial body.
A group of astronomers, led by Hal McAlister, director of Georgia State University’s Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy, have used the center’s array of telescopes to detect for the first ti
Researchers from the CEA’s Nuclear Energy Division have, for the first time, been able to make a quantitative prediction of the evolution of radiation-induced defects in a structural material. The results obtained for iron, using multi-scale simulation techniques based on the atomic scale, will help provide greater insight into material aging phenomena in existing nuclear power plants and may be applied to nuclear systems of the future. They are to be published in the “Nature Materials” jour
This picture is a composite of 30 images from ESA’s Huygens probe. They were taken from an altitude varying from 13 kilometres down to 8 kilometres when the probe was descending towards its landing site. View all raw images here: http://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/titanraw/index.htm
Astronomers announced Jan. 10 that they have a lead in the case of the missing disks. The report was presented by UCLA graduate student and Ph.D. candidate Peter Plavchan; his adviser, Michael Jura; and Sarah Lipscy, now at Ball Aerospace, to the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Diego. This lead may account for the missing evidence of red dwarfs forming planetary systems.
The evidence
Red dwarfs (or M Dwarfs) are stars like our Sun in many respects but smaller,
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