Notícies d'astronomia

Standing on the Chukchi Sea

Scientists on the sea ice in the Chukchi Sea off the north coast of Alaska disperse equipment on July 4, 2010, as they prepare to collect data on and below the ice. The research is part of NASA's ICESCAPE mission aboard the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy to sample the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of the ocean and sea ice. Impacts of Climate change on the Eco-Systems and Chemistry of the Arctic Pacific Environment (ICESCAPE) is a multi-year NASA shipborne project. The bulk of the research will take place in the Beaufort and Chukchi Sea’s in the summer of 2010 and fall of 2011. Image Credit: NASA/Kathryn Hansen

First NASA Astronaut To Send Live Tweet From Space Hosts Tweetup

NASA invites its Twitter followers to a special Tweetup with astronaut T.J. Creamer at 3 p.m. EDT on Thursday, July 29.

NASA Names Lugo As Director Of Glenn Research Center

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has named Ramon "Ray" Lugo III as director of the agency's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, effective July 18. Lugo has been Glenn's acting director since March.

NASA And Partners Assign Crews For Upcoming Space Station Missions

NASA and its international partners, the Russia Federal Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), have assigned four new International Space Station crews.

NASA Ceremony Honors Shuttle External Tank Workforce

NASA and Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company paid tribute to the workforce who built the external tanks for the space shuttle fleet on Thursday at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.

Smoother Landings

Spacecraft attempting to land on an unfamiliar surface need to perform a maneuver called “deep throttling" -- a step that allows the vehicle to precisely throttle down to perform a smooth, controlled landing. NASA and industry partners have demonstrated this type of engine control capability to help design a more reliable and robust descent engine that could be used to land space exploration vehicles on the moon, an asteroid or another planet. The Common Extensible Cryogenic Engine, also known as CECE, recently completed the fourth and final series of hot-fire tests on a 15,000-pound thrust class cryogenic technology demonstrator rocket engine, increasing the throttling capability by 35 percent over previous tests. This test series demonstrated this engine could go from a thrust range of 104 percent power down to 5.9 percent. This equates to an unprecedented 17.6:1 deep-throttling capability, which means this cryogenic engine can quickly throttle up and down. Image Credit: NASA

NASA Art And Design Contestants Create Multi-Media Visions Of Lunar Life

NASA has selected the winners in the 2010 Life and Work on the Moon Art and Design Contest from more than 200 international student entries.

NASA, Georgetown Invite Public to Astronauts' Discussion of Recent Space Shuttle Mission

NASA and Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business invite the public to a discussion with the most recent space shuttle crew to fly in space at 6:30 p.m. EDT on Monday, July 26.

NASA Awards Crew Robotics And Vehicle Equipment Contracts

NASA has awarded contracts to three companies and one university for crew robotics and vehicle equipment work.

NASA To Fly Into Hurricane Research This Summer

Three NASA aircraft will begin flights to study tropical cyclones on Aug. 15 during the agency's first major U.S.-based hurricane field campaign since 2001.

A Place in History

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to take the images combined into this full 360-degree view of the rover's surroundings after a drive on the 2,220th Martian day, or sol, of its mission (April 22, 2010). Opportunity launched on July 7, 2003, on a mission slated to last 90 days, landing on Mars in January 2004. The rover has exceeded its mission parameters by more than 2,200 days as its exploration of the Red Planet continues. Opportunity took some of the component images for this mosaic on Sol 2220, after the drive, and the rest on Sol 2221. Wind-formed ripples of dark sand make up much of the terrain surrounding this position. Patches of outcrop are visible to the south. For scale, the distance between the parallel wheel tracks is about 1 meter (about 40 inches). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA Takes Gamers on a Lunar Adventure With New Online Video Game

NASA has given gamers a taste of lunar adventure with release of Moonbase Alpha, an exciting new, free online video game.

Celestial Fireworks

Like an Independence Day fireworks display, a young, glittering collection of stars looks like an aerial burst. The cluster is surrounded by clouds of interstellar gas and dust -- the raw material for new star formation. The nebula, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina, contains a central cluster of huge, hot stars, called NGC 3603. This environment is not as peaceful as it looks. Ultraviolet radiation and violent stellar winds have blown out an enormous cavity in the gas and dust enveloping the cluster, providing an unobstructed view of the cluster. Most of the stars in the cluster were born around the same time but differ in size, mass, temperature, and color. The course of a star's life is determined by its mass, so a cluster of a given age will contain stars in various stages of their lives, giving an opportunity for detailed analyses of stellar life cycles. NGC 3603 also contains some of the most massive stars known. These huge stars live fast and die young, burning through their hydrogen fuel quickly and ultimately ending their lives in supernova explosions. Star clusters like NGC 3603 provide important clues to understanding the origin of massive star formation in the early, distant universe. Astronomers also use massive clusters to study distant starbursts that occur when galaxies collide, igniting a flurry of star formation. The proximity of NGC 3603 makes it an excellent lab for studying such distant and momentous events. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, R. O'Connell (University of Virginia), F. Paresce (National Institute for Astrophysics, Bologna, Italy), E. Young (Universities Space Research Association/Ames Research Center), the WFC3 Science Oversight Committee, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Launched on the Fourth of July

Space shuttle Discovery and its seven-member crew launched at 2:38 p.m. EDT on July 4, 2006 to begin their journey to the International Space Station during the STS-121 mission. The shuttle made history as it was the first human-occupied spacecraft to launch on Independence Day. During the 12-day mission, the crew tested new equipment and procedures that increase the safety of the orbiters. It also performed maintenance on the space station and delivered supplies, equipment and a new Expedition 13 crew member to the station. This mission carried on analysis of safety improvements that debuted on the Return to Flight mission, STS-114, and built upon those tests. Image Credit: NASA

All-American Salute

Astronaut John W. Young, commander of the Apollo 16 lunar landing mission, leaps from the lunar surface as he salutes the United States flag at the Descartes landing site during the first Apollo 16 extravehicular activity. Astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr., lunar module pilot, took this picture. The Lunar Module "Orion" is on the left. The Lunar Roving Vehicle is parked beside Orion and the object behind Young (in the shadow of the Lunar Module) is the Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph. Stone Mountain dominates the background of this lunar scene. Image Credit: NASA

A Rover Gets Its Wheels

Mars rover Curiosity, the centerpiece of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, is coming together for extensive testing prior to its late 2011 launch. This image taken June 29, 2010, shows the rover with the mobility system -- wheels and suspension -- in place after installation on June 28 and 29. Spacecraft engineers and technicians are assembling and testing the rover in a large cleanroom at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Curiosity's six-wheel mobility system, with a rocker-bogie suspension system, resembles the systems on earlier, smaller Mars rovers, but for Curiosity, the wheels will also serve as landing gear. Each wheel is half a meter (20 inches) in diameter. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA Updates Shuttle Target Launch Dates For Final Two Flights

NASA is targeting approximately 4:33 p.m. EDT on Nov. 1 for the launch of space shuttle Discovery's STS-133 mission and 4:19 p.m. EST on Feb. 26, 2011, for the liftoff of shuttle Endeavour's STS-134 flight from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Slingshot

There are two possible explanations for this 'slingshot' in space: kickback by a triple black hole system, or the effects of gravitational waves produced after two supermassive black holes merged a few million years earlier. The discovery of this object comes from a large, multi-wavelength survey, known as the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS). This survey includes data from Chandra, HST, XMM- Newton, as well as ground-based observatories. Of the 2,600 X-ray sources found in COSMOS, only one -- named CID-42 and located in a galaxy about 3.9 billion light years away -- coincides with two very close, compact optical sources. Image Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/F.Civano et al. Optical: NASA/STScI

NASA'S External Tank For Final Shuttle Flight Gets New Orleans Send-Off

NASA and Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company will hold a ceremony at 9 a.m. CDT on Thursday, July 8, at the agency's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.

Next International Space Station Residents Hold News Conference

The next trio of International Space Station residents will hold a news conference at 1 p.m. CDT on Tuesday, July 13, at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

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