SFGate.com: Micosoft has launch a competitor to google sky, the popular software program that lets computer users fly through the universe, viewing stars, planets and celestial bodies. The new product is called Worldwide Telescope. The virtual service combines images and databases from every major telescope and astronomical organization in the world. Microsoft says it is providing the resource for free in memory of Jim Gray, the Microsoft researcher who disappeared last year while sailing his boat to the Farallon Islands on a trip to scatter his mother's ashes. The project is an extension of Gray's work. "I never imagined (the telescope) would be so beautiful," said Alexander Szalay, an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University who worked with Gray on astronomy projects for more than a decade. Gray was an expert in databases, and he came to be accepted as "a card-carrying member" of the astronomical community for his work in bringing astronomical data online, Szalay said. A special version of the product is being developed for astronomers, and it's being considered as one way to visualize data in the Virtual Observatory, a project by the National Science Foundation to integrate all astronomical data online.
Related news pickGoogle launches virtual observatory
ScienceNOW: The heavens may be strewn with stars, galaxies, and nebulae, but the fact is astronomers don't know precisely where most of the ordinary matter in the universe is hiding. A new x-ray observation could help untangle that mystery: Astronomers have located a filament of hot gas stretching all the way from one cluster of galaxies to another. The filament is thought to be one thread in a vast web containing the missing ordinary matter, and, if confirmed, it could give scientists a better idea of where the rest of the stuff is lurking.
Baltimore Sun: NASA has awarded the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab $750 million to develop an Solar Probe mission, which will study the streams of charged particles the sun hurls into space from a vantage point within the sun’s corona – its outer atmosphere – where the processes that heat the corona and produce solar wind occur. At closest approach Solar Probe would zip past the sun at 125 miles per second, protected by a carbon-composite heat shield that must withstand up to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit and survive blasts of radiation and energized dust at levels not experienced by any previous spacecraft. Launch is planned for 2015, with the craft's first solar flyby just three months later - thanks to a boost from the sun's gravity.
Space.com: In a distant galaxy, a star orbiting a massive central black hole strays too close to the insatiable giant and is torn apart. But before it can be devoured, the star lets out one last scream in a flare of light that slowly echoes across the galaxy.
 Astronomers on Earth pick up this faint call and use it to map the nucleus of the galaxy from which it emanated.
This scenario is no bit of science fiction--a team of astronomers discovered one of these rare and dramatic events while combing through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey last December. Their observations are detailed in the May issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Argus Leader: Most South Dakotans probably don't either, but as the Sanford Underground Lab at Homestake takes the first concrete steps toward operations, people in the Black Hills and the rest of the state might get better acquainted with scientific concepts such as "dark matter." About 350 scientists gathered in Lead recently to begin outlining some of the first groups of experiments.
Nature: The origin of the cosmic rays that bombard Earth has troubled physicists for nigh on a century. Supernova remnants are a favoured source — but we should keep our minds open to alternatives.
Science News: Astronomers are honing measurements of a familiar cosmic parameter to shed new light on dark energy, the mysterious entity that’s accelerating the universe’s rate of expansion. Known as the Hubble constant, this parameter indicates the current rate at which distant astronomical objects are receding, a number that can be used to estimate the age of the universe. A new measuring method has reduced uncertainty in the constant’s value by more than half, to 4.8 percent, Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore reported May 5, at the beginning of a four-day Space Telescope symposium on dark energy. The method relies on laserlike radio emissions from water molecules that lie within the swirling disk of gas that surrounds a supermassive black hole at the heart of a relatively nearby galaxy, NGC 4258.
Nature: What do you see if you peer into the exhaust of a jet engine larger than our Solar System? Only astronomers with the largest radio telescopes can see the full picture — and definitive observations are beginning to filter through.
BBC News: An observatory has opened in an area of Northumberland recognised as having the least light pollution in England. The £450,000 Kielder Observatory will offer astronomers views of the universe uncluttered by intruding light from towns and cities. The timber structure is perched on a hilltop location on Black Fell and was chosen because the area is famous for having the darkest skies in England. It is hoped the observatory will be popular with professional and amateurs. The Kielder Observatory has been funded by the Northumberland Strategic Partnership with help from regeneration agency One NorthEast, the European Regional Development Fund and the Northern Rock Foundation.
Nature News: Physicists in Italy claimed last week to have seen particles of dark matter. Their announcement has got their rivals riled and raises questions about what constitutes evidence of a new particle. Rita Bernabei of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Rome presented her team's latest results on 16 April at an international meeting of particle physicists in Venice, Italy. Their detector, DAMA/LIBRA (Dark Matter Large Sodium Iodide Bulk for Rare Processes), located deep under the country's Gran Sasso mountain, seems to be observing dark matter, Bernabei says. Most agree that the experiment is picking up something: “They're seeing a signal, there's no doubt about that,” says Tim Sumner of Imperial College London. But despite this, critics say that they don't believe the detector has found the elusive particles. “For me, it's not proof that they have seen dark matter,” says Gilles Gerbier, a physicist at the Centre for Atomic Energy in Saclay, France. He adds that he's stumped by what's causing the signal.
Space.com: Experts took part in a special panel "Forging the Future of Space Science: The Next 50 Years," held at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). The discussion is part of an international public seminar series, marking the 50th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year that launched science into space. The colloquia series is organized by the Space Studies Board, a research arm of the National Academy of Sciences. Leonard David describes some of the conclusions reached at the syposium at space.com
BBC NEWS: The US space agency (Nasa) has extended the international Cassini-Huygens mission by two years. The unmanned Cassini-Huygens spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn in 2004 on a mission that was supposed to come to an end in July this year. The two-year mission extension will encompass some 60 extra orbits of Saturn and more flybys of its moons.
BBC news: Nasa's Stereo orbiters have captured stunning new images of spaceborne debris thrown out from the Sun. The twin spacecraft have seen Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) hurling material into a comet, ripping off its tail. Scientists hope the probes will allow better forecasting of CMEs, which sometimes disrupt communication systems on Earth.
Nature: X-ray data reveal that our Galaxy is shedding part of its gas, a phenomenon previously associated only with much more active star-forming galaxies. So what is driving the process in the Milky Way?
Los Angeles Times: A successful Chinese missile test last year that destroyed one of China's own aging satellites has substantially added to space debris around Earth, increasing the danger that a chain reaction of colliding space junk could threaten parts of the world's satellite network, scientists said Tuesday.
The threat is that debris could begin slamming into other debris, creating a cascading effect called supercriticality, according to scientists addressing the American Physical Society conference here this week.
"Debris in space is already a problem," said David Wright, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. "But it's potentially a very big problem."
>Geoffrey Forden, an MIT physicist and expert on the Chinese space program, said the danger from space debris was actually more of a worry than the threat that the Chinese, or some other country, could intentionally cripple American space assets with antisatellite weapons.
According to Wright, the Chinese shoot-down on Jan. 11, 2007, added more than 2 million pieces of debris in low-Earth orbit, where most satellites are located.
Related News Picks
Were the correct reentry models used in deciding to shoot down spy satellite?
Broken spy satellite hit by US missile
North Canada, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans likely path of spy satellite debris
More doubts surface over Pentagon's explanation for shooting down spy satellite
North Canada, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans likely path of spy satellite debris
New York Times: A team of Italian and Chinese physicists on Wednesday renewed a controversial claim that they had detected the mysterious dark matter particles that astronomers say swaddle the galaxies in halos and direct the evolution of the universe. The team, called Dama, from “DArk MAtter,” and led by Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome, has maintained since 2000 that a yearly modulation in the rate of flashes in a detector nearly a mile underneath the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy is the result of the Earth’s passage through a “wind” of dark matter particles as it goes around the Sun. Other groups of hunters of dark matter have just as consistently failed to find any evidence of the putative particles.
Related Physics Today article
A bubble chamber brings new capabilities to the search for WIMPs April 2008
Scientific Blogging: UK astronomers have produced the most sensitive infrared map of the distant Universe ever undertaken. Combining data over a period of three years, they have produced an image containing over 100,000 galaxies over an area four times the size of the full Moon. Some of the first results from the project were presented by Dr Sebastien Foucaud from the University of Nottingham at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast.
Due to the finite speed of light, these observations allow astronomers to look back in time over 10 billion years, producing images of galaxies in the Universe's infancy. The image is so large and so deep that thousands of galaxies can be studied at these early epochs for the first time. By observing in the infrared, astronomers can now peer further back in time, since light from the most distant galaxies is shifted towards redder wavelengths as it travels through the expanding Universe.
read more
space.com: Astronomers have finally tracked down the missing starting point of one of the two types of solar wind.
The solar wind is a stream of electrically charged particles that flows constantly out from the sun in all directions. The particles can make the journey from the sun to the Earth in fewer than 10 days and, when the wind turns into a storm, create the magnificent auroras that dance across polar skies when they interact with the Earth's magnetic field.
The parts of the solar wind that emanate from the sun's equatorial region originate at the edges of bright regions in the sun's atmosphere and are released when the magnetic fields of two bright regions link up, scientists announced last week at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Reuters: An ambitious vision to take people to the moon and Mars may fall apart before it even gets off the ground because of uncertain planning and inadequate funding, several experts said on Thursday.
A congressional report said NASA's replacement for the space shuttle, the Constellation Program, is in jeopardy, and members of Congress as well as at least one former astronaut agreed at a hearing on the issue.
Science: The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) based in China is designed to peer deeper into space and measure more spectral emissions than the project that inspires it, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
 Engineers this month are installing LAMOST's eyes and optic nerves: 1-meterwide hexagonal sections of its two mirrors and the 4000 optical fibers on its focal surface that will feed starlight into a battalion of spectrographs. Viewing conditions at Xinglong, in China's industrialized north, are not ideal: Independent experts say that siting the scope in western China would have been better. Every week, dust and sand blown in from the Gobi Desert have to be brushed off the correcting mirror. On the bright side, Xinglong, in the foothills of the Yanshan Mountains, gets an average of 270 clear nights of viewing each year. The whole system--which has cost $40 million so far to build--should be in place by fall, when final testing will begin, says LAMOST's chief engineer, Cui Xiangqun, director of Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology. Data collection should begin in earnest next year.
Nature: The University of Toronto's David Dunlap Observatory, which houses a 1.88-metre reflecting telescope in the town of Richmond Hill, Ontario, may see last light as soon as 30 June. The university is negotiating the sale of the observatory and 77 hectares of surrounding land, estimated to be worth Can$100 million (US$98 million).
Nature: Alan Stern stepped down as head of science programmes at NASA on Tuesday.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has named Edward Weiler, currently director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, as Stern's interim replacement. Weiler held Stern's post, of associate administrator for science, from 1998 to 2004.
Washington Post: Since astronomers identified the first planet outside our solar system 13 years ago there are now, according to the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, 277 confirmed "extrasolar" planets, and quite a few more on the list of those suspected but not yet confirmed.
This explosion in planetary discoveries is taking place at such speed that even those most intimately involved are often amazed.
"This is an absolutely astounding time for this field," said Mark Swain of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who last week reported finding the first "exoplanet" to have organic methane in its atmosphere.
The Washington Post conducted a discussion forum with MIT's Sara Seager on the state of extra planetary research on Monday afternoon.
The Daily Telegraph: The brightest burst of light ever seen - which peaked at a few hundred million billion times the brightness of our Sun - has been witnessed by the Swift satellite. The 50 second burst was so bright it was visible to the naked eye, even though it was seven thousand times further away than the Andromeda galaxy, in the constellation of Bootes.
Swift typically finds two gamma-ray bursts a week; but for the first time Swift found five bursts within 24 hours. The second burst of the day is the new record holder.
The enormous energy released in the explosion - brighter than the light from all of the stars in five million Milky Way Galaxies - was caused by the death of a massive star which collapsed to form a black hole.
Related links
Movie showing the visible light burst of GRB080319B (Las Campanas Observatory, Chile)
Associated press release related to visible observation (Las Campanas Observatory, Chile)
NASA Satellite Detects Record Gamma Ray Burst Explosion Halfway Across Universe (NASA Press release)
Swift satellite
Gamma-Ray Bursts (Wikipedia)
Physics Today: Opportunities for amateur astronomers to observe the night sky are becoming rare as light pollution fades the night sky away. Yet, thanks to a new product called Google Sky, a simple desktop computer can provide some unprecedented views of the universe that were previously available only to professional astronomers. Google Sky is based on the same technology as Google Earth and displays the visible universe based on a mosaic of images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digitized Sky Survey and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Thumbnail images at the bottom of Google Sky's display can bring up high resolution images of the planets, the constellations, highlights from the Hubble Space Telescope, famous stars, galaxies and nebulae, and views of the universe in the x-ray, ultraviolet and infrared. Other items available through Google Sky include:
* Infrared - An infrared view of the sky from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). Change the transparency of this layer by moving the slide bar to blend the optical and infrared.
* Microwave - A view of the microwave sky from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which shows the universe as it was 380,000 years after the big bang.
* Historical - The sky as drawn by Giovanni Maria Cassini (printed in 1792) showing the constellations in their classical form from the collections of David Rumsey.
Other online observatories
Bradford Robotic Telescope
Micro-Observatory
Seeing in the Dark
Slooh
Various: An near-infrared transmission spectrum of the planet HD 189733b indicates traces of methane. The research from Mark R. Swain, Gautam Vasisht, and Giovanna Tinetti, which was published in Nature today has led to wild speculation in the press that scientists will soon discover planets capable of supporting life.
 HD 189733b is about 63 light years from Earth. In their paper the researchers confirmed an earlier observation that the planet also shows traces of water molecules. Tinetti from University College, London, told BBC News: "This planet is a gas giant very similar to our own Jupiter, but orbiting very close to its star." Swain of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif said in a press conference on Wednesday, “The big news is that we were able to do this at all.”
The methane signature was found by using the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the planet passing in front the star. As the star's light passes through the planet's atmosphere, the gases imprinted their chemical signatures on the transmitted light (see video from ESA and NASA).
Although the results are considered a breakthrough, as Sara Seager, a planetary theorist at M.I.T., said at the press conference, the findings still needed to be duplicated. “Hubble was never been designed to make measurements like this,” she said. “This is pushing the telescope to its limits.”
Related Links
The presence of methane in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet (Nature)
Mark R. Swain
Gautam Vasisht
Giovanna Tinetti
Google Sky image of HD 189733b
Hubble finds first organic molecule on extrasolar planet
Methane found on distant world (BBC)
Methane gas find raises hopes of life beyond Earth (The Independent)
Stuff of Life (but Not Life Itself) Is Detected on a Distant Planet (New York Times)
Key Organic Molecule Detected at Extrasolar Planet (space.com)
Hubble camera spots traces of life-forming gas (LA Times)
Science: Planetary systems are born around young stars and grow from vast clouds of dust and gas called protoplanetary disks. Models predict that as our own solar system's protoplanetary disk evolved, the dust and gas pushed each other around while constantly being stirred and jolted by magnetic fields and gravitational torques. The resulting mixing and motion set the chemical compositions of the planetesimals that formed and from which planets eventually grew. Although evidence for mixing is found in objects in our solar system, such as primitive meteorites, questions remain about the details of the processes responsible and whether this mixing was common in other protoplanetary disks. A new paper in Science on observations of the disk around the star AA Tau that suggest that we will soon be able to address these questions.
BBC: The European Space Agency (Esa) is planning to present a plan to ministers in November to send a robot rover to the Moon in 2015, in order to carry out lunar science and test important technologies for the future.
The Tech Herald: A fast-travelling meteorite which struck a region near the Peruvian/Bolivian border in September 2007, should according to standard theory, have disintegrated in the Earth's atmosphere long before reaching the ground.
The fact that the rock meteorite didn't perform as expected and instead crashed to earth leaving a deep 49-foot-wide (15 meter) crater, means scientists must now rethink their meteorite theories, said Peter Schultz, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University in Rhode Island.
Related links
Press release from Brown University
USA Today: A pair of hot, luminous stars locked in orbit with each other and ripping each other apart will one day explode in a supernova that could send out a stream of gamma rays which if aimed at the Earth, could destroy most life on the planet.
"I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel," said researcher Peter Tuthill, an astronomer at the University of Sydney.
More than 400 million years ago a similar supernova explosion is believed to have killed more than 90% of the species of the time (see Recent Nearby Supernovae May Have Left Their Marks on Earth, Physics Today May 2002, page 19).
Science: Experts can't say exactly when the next Earth-bound asteroid will heave into view, says Richard Stone in Science magazine but they are confident that humanity has the tools to defend itself. There are several deflection scenarios; in most, the straightforward objective would be to change an asteroid's speed so that it arrives too early or too late to hit Earth. In an accompanying piece Stone looks at the network of new telescopes will spot thousands of near-Earth asteroids and comets. If one is headed our way, will world leaders be ready to respond?
Science: hysicists can't travel to a black hole to see how it ticks, but they have taken a big step toward creating something similar in the lab. Using an optical fiber and laser light, Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St. Andrews in the U.K. and colleagues have simulated a "white hole"—essentially a black hole working in reverse—as they report in more detail in Science magazine. The model might soon mimic perhaps the most tantalizing property of a black hole: the "Hawking radiation" that should emanate from it.
BBC: Astronomers at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona have released the first images taken using its two giant 8m diameter mirrors.
 LBT has 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. The detailed pictures show a spiral galaxy located 102 million light-years away from the Milky Way. LBT has been 20 years in the making but promises to allow astronomers to probe the Universe further back in time and in more detail than ever before.
see also World's strongest telescope at full power in Arizona (USA Today) and Arizona Telescope Sees Deep into the Cosmos (NPR)
Nature: Britain has reached an agreement that will allow UK astronomers continued access to the Gemini Observatory.
In November, the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) announced its intention to withdraw from the observatory — which has 8-metre telescopes in Mauna Kea in Hawaii and Cerro Pachon in Chile — because of a budget shortfall (see insert PT link). Subsequent negotiations to retain access to the Hawaiian telescope failed, raising fears that British astronomers would have no access to a large telescope in the Northern Hemisphere.
But on 27 February the STFC announced that it would remain in the Gemini partnership. It plans to save money by selling a portion of its nearly £4 million (US$7.9 million) annual subscription for telescope time to other interested nations.
Science: NASA says it is willing to fly a $1.5 billion experiment designed to detect antimatter. But Congress would have to come up with as much as $4 billion to make it happen, the agency says. Supporters of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) dispute those cost estimates but face an uphill struggle to get the 7000-kg probe into orbit.
In a 17-page report to Congress that was released two weeks ago, NASA paints a sobering picture of what it would take to attach the instrument to the international space station. Samuel Ting, the physics Nobelist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who has championed the project, says the 16-nation AMS collaboration has no money to buy another ride into space.
Related Physics Today article
NASA cancels science flight, ditches international partners (May 2007, page 30)
The Guardian: The UK's world-class network of radio telescopes run by the Jodrell Bank observatory is facing closure as last minute efforts failed to find the £40m needed to run it. Its future was thrown into doubt earlier this week when the UK's main physics funding body announced it may have to cut funding for the telescopes to help plug an £80m hole in its budget.
Work at Jodrell Bank, based at the University of Manchester, has put the UK at number two in the world for the study of stars and planets.
see also For 50 years, it has watched the stars. Now, to plug a black hole in the budget, Jodrell Bank may close (the Independent)
Nature: The cosmos is thought to be awash with gravitational waves to which humanity is, as yet, deaf. Nature's Trudy E. Bell reports on LISA, an experiment on an unprecedented scale designed to put that right.
Physics Today: Eight new papers interpreting new data from the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) mission have been released. WMAP is designed to elucidate the history and composition of the universe by creating an high resolution map of temperature fluctuations and polarization in the cosmic microwave background radiation.
 The new papers are based on five-years worth of observations, two years more than the 2003 set of papers (see Physics Today April 2003, page 21). The new data have yielded improved determinations of the Hubble constant (70.1 ± 1.3 km/s per Mpc) and the cosmic density of baryonic (ordinary) matter (4.6 ± 0.2% pf the total cosmic budget of matter and energy) that has implications for cosmological models of the early universe. WMAP has also refined the age of the Universe to 13.73 ± 0.12 billion years. The new WMAP data rules out the existence of very massive neutrino species.
Related Links
Physics Today April 2003, page 21
WMAP group
The Reference Frame
Science: When NASA science chief Alan Stern last month announced that the space agency is backing a mission to collect rocks and soil from Mars and bring them back to Earth, many planetary researchers reacted with dismay rather than joy after looking at NASA's 2009 budget. According to budget documents released last month projected spending on Mars would be cut by half over the next 5 years. As a result, many scientists fear that NASA is abandoning a carefully plotted and extraordinarily successful research endeavor on the Red Planet in exchange for promises of an expensive mission far in the future.
New York Times: Nearly half a century ago, Frank Drake, a young radio astronomer with extraterrestrials on his mind, stepped up to a blackboard in Green Bank, W.Va., and scribbled a string of symbols intended to bring some clarity to the question of just how alone humanity is in the cosmos. The Drake Equation, as it is known, has served as the bones of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and for the hopeful field of astrobiology ever since. Drake, who conducted the first fruitless SETI listening tour, of a pair of stars in 1960, once said that the most likely aliens to hear from would be a race of immortals, who had plenty of time to wait for an answer. But he said now that he no longer expected to hear from ET in his lifetime. Under realistic estimates, he said, you would need to look at 10 million stars (there are 200 billion in the galaxy), and there is not enough time left. Another trend on Earth, where powerful radio and tv transmitters are being replaced by undersea cables and satellites, mean that the Earth is becoming radio quiet, and ET might have done the same. “That’s big change nobody anticipated,” said Drake. Once the big powerful transmitters go off the air, “We will still exist but we will be hard to detect.”
USA Today: Five spacecraft that flew past the Earth have each displayed unexpected anomalies in their motions, similar to that of the Pioneer spacecraft when they left the solar system. The anomalies consist of a tiny but unexplained constant acceleration toward the sun. "There's definitely something going on," says Montana State University physicist Ronald Hellings, "Whether that's because of new physics or some problem with the model we have is yet to be worked out, as far as I know. A lot of people are trying to look into this."
Guardian Unlimited: In space, no one can hear you scream — which is no bad thing, because scientists have discovered that it is a lot filthier than they thought.
Researchers revealed yesterday that limitless stretches of space are strewn with interstellar soot, making it harder to see very distant objects such as exploding stars or supernovae.
The Washington Post: Since the beginning of the space age, astronomers have dreamed of putting telescopes and other instruments on the far side of the moon.
The Christian Science Monitor: Researching the prospects for life beyond our solar system is moving to the next level. Exoplanet hunters are getting instruments that promise to spot Earth-like planets around alien stars. In some cases, they may even yield crude estimates of how life-friendly such a planet may be.
The New York Times: It’s been called the whitest place on Earth, and at 90 degrees below zero, it could be the coolest place on the planet for astronomy.
BBC: New evidence suggests more than half the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way could have similar planetary systems. "Our observations suggest that between 20% and 60% of Sun-like stars have evidence for the formation of rocky planets not unlike the processes we think led to planet Earth," he said. "That is very exciting."
The New York Times: The next president of the United States should give NASA an additional $3 billion each year, both to get to Mars and to focus attention on science issues in space and on Earth, a group of scientists, industry figures and former astronauts said on Thursday.
San Francisco Chronicle: Astronomers chart colossal telescopes to see farther, clearer
The New York Times: The space shuttle Atlantis dodged an approaching weather front and rumbled into space on Thursday, carrying the European science laboratory Columbus to the International Space Station.
MSNBC: Understanding magnetic reconnection could lead to future energy source
MSNBC: Budget proposal calls for ‘greener’ NASA to track climate change
Science: An inadequate budget and daunting technical challenges will force the next U.S. president to rethink current plans for a postshuttle NASA. Space scientists are offering input on what those changes might look like.
The Washington Post: The Messenger spacecraft that sped past Mercury on Jan. 14 sent back pictures of a geological formation never seen before in the solar system: a central depression with more than 100 narrow troughs radiating out from it.
The New York Times: If Sputnik 1 was the beep-beep-beep heard round the world, Explorer 1 announced itself 50 years ago this week by the collective sigh of relief from an anxious American public.
San Francisco Chronicle: Tiny samples of a glowing comet, flown back to Earth by a pioneering spacecraft named Stardust, hold remarkably little dust from any ancient far-off stars, but a lot of the stuff that makes up nearby rocky asteroids, Livermore scientists have found to their surprise.
MSNBC: Senior stars might borrow material from neighbors to make new worlds
Los Angeles Times: On the night of Jan. 31, 1958 -- less than 90 days after JPL was given the go-ahead -- Explorer 1 lifted off the pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The story of JPL's 90-day miracle became the stuff of scientific legend. "It's an attractive story," JPL historian Erik Conway told Los Angeles Times reporter John Johnson Jr. "The problem is, it's not true."
USA Today: NASA is wrestling with a potentially dangerous problem in a spacecraft, this time in a moon rocket that hasn't even been built yet.
Engineers are concerned that the new rocket meant to replace the space shuttle and send astronauts on their way to the moon could shake violently during the first few minutes of flight, possibly destroying the entire vehicle.
"They know it's a real problem," said Carnegie Mellon University engineering professor Paul Fischbeck, who has consulted on risk issues with NASA in the past. "This thing is going to shake apart the whole structure, and they've got to solve it."
|
