Heavens

Deep Impact spacecraft on way to Hartley 2 comet

Posted By News On June 25, 2010 - 8:30pm

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- On Sunday, NASA's historic Deep Impact spacecraft will fly past Earth for the fifth and last time on its current University of Maryland-led EPOXI mission. At time of closest approach to Earth, the spacecraft will be about 30,400 kilometers (18,900 miles) above the South Atlantic.

Life on Mars? Wet era was global

Posted By News On June 25, 2010 - 4:20pm

Conditions favourable to life may once have existed all over Mars. Detailed studies of minerals found inside craters show that liquid water was widespread, not only in the southern highlands, but also beneath the northern plains.

NASA infrared imagery hinted Darby would become a hurricane

Posted By News On June 24, 2010 - 9:20pm

Infrared imagery provides forecasters with a look at the temperature of cloud tops in tropical cyclones, sea surface and land surface temperatures and more. NASA infrared imagery from the morning of June 24 revealed that Darby had strong convection that is an indicator of a strengthening storm. Tropical Storm Darby became the second hurricane of the Eastern Pacific Ocean season this morning.

Team finds widespread glacial meltwater valleys on Mars

Posted By News On June 24, 2010 - 3:10pm

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Planetary scientists have uncovered telltale signs of water on Mars — frozen and liquid — in the earliest period of the Red Planet's history. A new claim, made public this month, is that a deep ocean covered some of the northern latitudes.

Venus may have once been a habitable planet

Posted By News On June 24, 2010 - 3:00pm

ESA's Venus Express is helping planetary scientists investigate whether Venus once had oceans. If it did, it may even have begun its existence as a habitable planet similar to Earth.

NASA satellites see Hurricane Celia strengthen and open an eye

Posted By News On June 23, 2010 - 7:20pm

Hurricane Celia dropped to a Category One hurricane during the late afternoon hours on June 22, and today, June 23 by 11 a.m. EDT, it had powered back up to a Category Two hurricane in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Satellite imagery confirmed the strengthening visibly with the emergence of an eye in the hurricane.

HD209458b: first superstorm on exoplanet detected

Posted By News On June 23, 2010 - 5:50pm

HD209458b was the first exoplanet to be found transiting: every 3.5 days the planet moves in front of its host star, blocking a small portion of the starlight during a three-hour period. During such an event a tiny fraction of the starlight filters through the planet's atmosphere, leaving an imprint. A team of astronomers from the Leiden University, the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON), and MIT in the United States, have used ESO's Very Large Telescope and its powerful CRIRES spectrograph to detect and analyse these faint fingerprints, observing the planet for about five hours, as it passed in front of its star.

New 'fix' for cosmic clocks could help uncover ripples in space-time

Posted By News On June 24, 2010 - 6:40pm

An international team of scientists including University of British Columbia astronomer Ingrid Stairs has discovered a promising way to fine-tune pulsars into the best precision time-pieces in the Universe.

Timely technology sees tiny transitions

Posted By News On June 23, 2010 - 8:00pm

Scientists can detect the movements of single molecules by using fluorescent tags or by pulling them in delicate force measurements, but only for a few minutes. A new technique by Rice University researchers will allow them to track single molecules without modifying them -- and it works over longer timescales.