Space In The News: July 2014

Thursday, July 31, 2014

NASA's Mars 2020 Rover Payload Announced – Two JPL Instruments Make the Cut

ScienceDaily: Astronomy News

Double star with weird and wild planet-forming discs

Posted: 30 Jul 2014 10:29 AM PDT

Astronomers have found wildly misaligned planet-forming gas discs around the two young stars in the binary system HK Tauri. These new observations provide the clearest picture ever of protoplanetary discs in a double star. The new result also helps to explain why so many exoplanets — unlike the planets in the Solar System — came to have strange, eccentric or inclined orbits.

Mercury's bizzare magnetic field tells scientists how its interior is different from Earth's

Posted: 30 Jul 2014 06:43 AM PDT

Mercury's interior is different from the Earth's interior in a way that explains Mercury's bizarre magnetic field, planetary physicists report. Measurements from NASA's Messenger spacecraft have revealed that Mercury's magnetic field is approximately three times stronger at its northern hemisphere than its southern one.

ScienceDaily: Galaxies News

Weighing the Milky Way: Researchers devise precise method for calculating the mass of galaxies

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 07:49 PM PDT

Does the Milky Way look fat in this picture? Has Andromeda been taking skinny selfies? Using a new, more accurate method for measuring the mass of galaxies, and international group of researchers has shown that the Milky Way has half the Mass of the Andromeda Galaxy.

ScienceDaily: Extrasolar Planets News

Double star with weird and wild planet-forming discs

Posted: 30 Jul 2014 10:29 AM PDT

ScienceDaily: Stars News

Double star with weird and wild planet-forming discs

Posted: 30 Jul 2014 10:29 AM PDT

ScienceDaily: Cosmic Rays News

NASA-funded X-ray instrument settles interstellar debate

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 07:56 PM PDT

New findings from a NASA-funded instrument have resolved a decades-old puzzle about a fog of low-energy X-rays observed over the entire sky. Thanks to refurbished detectors first flown on a NASA sounding rocket in the 1970s, astronomers have now confirmed the long-held suspicion that much of this glow stems from a region of million-degree interstellar plasma known as the local hot bubble, or LHB.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

NASA to Announce Mars 2020 Rover Instruments | New NASA Studies to Examine Climate/Vegetation Links

ScienceDaily: Astronomy News

Revolutionary microshutter technology hurdles significant challenges
NASA-funded X-ray instrument settles interstellar debate
Weighing the Milky Way: Researchers devise precise method for calculating the mass of galaxies
NASA long-lived Mars Opportunity rover passes 25 miles of driving
Cassini spacecraft reveals 101 geysers and more on icy Saturn moon

Revolutionary microshutter technology hurdles significant challenges

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 07:56 PM PDT

NASA technologists have hurdled a number of significant technological challenges in their quest to improve an already revolutionary observing technology originally created for the James Webb Space Telescope.

NASA-funded X-ray instrument settles interstellar debate

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 07:56 PM PDT

Weighing the Milky Way: Researchers devise precise method for calculating the mass of galaxies

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 07:49 PM PDT

NASA long-lived Mars Opportunity rover passes 25 miles of driving

Posted: 28 Jul 2014 04:22 PM PDT

NASA's Opportunity Mars rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2004, now holds the off-Earth roving distance record after accruing 25 miles (40 kilometers) of driving. The previous record was held by the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 rover.

Cassini spacecraft reveals 101 geysers and more on icy Saturn moon

Posted: 28 Jul 2014 04:15 PM PDT

Scientists using mission data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have identified 101 distinct geysers erupting on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. Their analysis suggests it is possible for liquid water to reach from the moon's underground sea all the way to its surface.

ScienceDaily: Dark Matter News

Weighing the Milky Way: Researchers devise precise method for calculating the mass of galaxies

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 07:49 PM PDT

ScienceDaily: Nebulae News

Glow in space is evidence of a hot bubble in our galaxy

Posted: 28 Jul 2014 06:44 AM PDT

A recent study shows that the emission is dominated by the local hot bubble of gas -- 1 million degrees -- with, at most, 40 percent of emission originating within the solar system. The findings should put to rest the disagreement about the origin of the X-ray emission and confirm the existence of the local hot bubble.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

ScienceDaily: Astronomy News

Glow in space is evidence of a hot bubble in our galaxy

Posted: 28 Jul 2014 06:44 AM PDT

ScienceDaily: Cosmic Rays News

Glow in space is evidence of a hot bubble in our galaxy

Posted: 28 Jul 2014 06:44 AM PDT

Monday, July 28, 2014

Mars Opportunity Passes 25 Miles of Driving | Cassini Reveals 101 Geysers and More | Printing the Metals of the Future

Friday, July 25, 2014

NASA’s Mars Spacecraft Maneuvers to Prepare for Close Comet Flyby


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NASA's Mars Spacecraft Maneuvers to Prepare for Close Comet Flyby
NASA is taking steps to protect its Mars orbiters, while preserving opportunities to gather valuable science, as Comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring nears Mars on Oct. 19. › Read full story

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ScienceDaily: Astronomy News

New mass map of distant galaxy cluster is most precise yet

Posted: 24 Jul 2014 07:42 AM PDT

Astronomers have mapped the mass within a galaxy cluster more precisely than ever before. Created using observations from Hubble's Frontier Fields observing program, the map shows the amount and distribution of mass within MCS J0416.1-2403, a massive galaxy cluster found to be 160 trillion times the mass of the Sun.

Hubble finds three surprisingly dry exoplanets: 'Hot Jupiters' had only one-tenth to one one-thousandth the amount of water predicted

Posted: 24 Jul 2014 06:28 AM PDT

Astronomers have gone looking for water vapor in the atmospheres of three planets orbiting stars similar to the Sun -- and have come up nearly dry. The three planets, known as HD 189733b, HD 209458b, and WASP-12b, are between 60 and 900 light-years away from Earth and were thought to be ideal candidates for detecting water vapor in their atmospheres because of their high temperatures where water turns into a measurable vapor.

ScienceDaily: Galaxies News

New mass map of distant galaxy cluster is most precise yet

Posted: 24 Jul 2014 07:42 AM PDT

ScienceDaily: Extrasolar Planets News

Hubble finds three surprisingly dry exoplanets: 'Hot Jupiters' had only one-tenth to one one-thousandth the amount of water predicted

Posted: 24 Jul 2014 06:28 AM PDT

ScienceDaily: Stars News

Hubble finds three surprisingly dry exoplanets: 'Hot Jupiters' had only one-tenth to one one-thousandth the amount of water predicted

Posted: 24 Jul 2014 06:28 AM PDT

ScienceDaily: Dark Matter News

New mass map of distant galaxy cluster is most precise yet

Posted: 24 Jul 2014 07:42 AM PDT

Thursday, July 24, 2014

ScienceDaily: Extrasolar Planets News

New approach in search for extraterrestrial intelligence: Target alien polluters

Posted: 23 Jul 2014 08:12 AM PDT

Humanity is on the threshold of being able to detect signs of alien life on other worlds. By studying exoplanet atmospheres, we can look for gases like oxygen and methane that only coexist if replenished by life. But those gases come from simple life forms like microbes. What about advanced civilizations? Would they leave any detectable signs? They might, if they spew industrial pollution into the atmosphere.

ScienceDaily: Astronomy News

Voyager spacecraft might not have reached interstellar space
New approach in search for extraterrestrial intelligence: Target alien polluters
Atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon
Lives and deaths of sibling stars
Satellite galaxies put astronomers in a spin

Voyager spacecraft might not have reached interstellar space

Posted: 23 Jul 2014 08:41 AM PDT

In 2012, the Voyager mission team announced that the Voyager 1 spacecraft had passed into interstellar space, traveling further from Earth than any other humanmade object. But, in the nearly two years since that historic announcement, and despite subsequent observations backing it up, uncertainty about whether Voyager 1 really crossed the threshold continues.

New approach in search for extraterrestrial intelligence: Target alien polluters

Posted: 23 Jul 2014 08:12 AM PDT

Atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon

Posted: 23 Jul 2014 08:10 AM PDT

An astronomer has published the results of the comparison of his model of Titan's atmosphere with the latest data.

Lives and deaths of sibling stars

Posted: 23 Jul 2014 08:09 AM PDT

In a new image from ESO, young stars huddle together against clouds of glowing gas and lanes of dust. The star cluster, NGC 3293, would have been just a cloud of gas and dust itself about ten million years ago, but as stars began to form it became the bright group of stars we see here. Clusters like this are laboratories that allow astronomers to learn about how stars evolve.

Satellite galaxies put astronomers in a spin

Posted: 23 Jul 2014 08:08 AM PDT

Astronomers have studied 380 galaxies and shown that their small satellite galaxies almost always move in rotating discs. However, such satellite galaxy discs are not predicted by current models of the formation of structures in the Universe. This discovery could cause modelers serious headaches in the years ahead.