On January 4, 2007, SkyFOX pilot Rob Marshall and photojournalist Josh White captured this incredible video of a Russian rocket body bursting into flames while they were flying over Denver in a helicopter. The rocket was used to carry a satellite called CoRoT into space on December 27, 2006.
Solscape
ORNL team discovers new way to spin up pulsars
A team of scientists using Oak Ridge National Laboratory supercomputers has discovered the first plausible explanation for a pulsar’s spin that fits the observations made by astronomers. Anthony Mezzacappa of the Department of Energy lab’s Physics Division and John Blondin of North Carolina State University explain their results in the newest issue of the journal „Nature“.
http://www.ornl.gov/ornl/news/news-releases/2007/ornl-team-discovers-new-way-to-spin-up-pulsars
Seen aus flüssigem Methan
Den Verdacht gab es schon länger, doch dank der detaillierten Auswertung von Radardaten der Raumsonde Cassini vom 22. Juli 2006 glauben amerikanische Wissenschaftler nun, eindeutige Belege dafür gefunden zu haben, dass es auf dem Saturnmond Titan tatsächlich Seen aus flüssigem Methan gibt. Die Forscher berichten über ihre Ergebnisse in der neuen Ausgabe des Wissenschaftsmagazins „Nature“.
Titan Has Liquid Lakes, Scientists Report in Nature
Blue Origin’s Rocket is Finally Revealed
Amazon.com’s founder Jeff Bezos has a rocket company on the side called „Blue Origin“. What was going on within this company has been a huge secret for several years. Now we know more. The Blue Origin website has been updated with photos and videos of the new Goddard rocket, which blasted off on November 13, 2006, from the West Texas launch facility. For its maiden voyage, the rocket launched vertically, reached an altitude of 87 metres, and then landed back down vertically on the launch pad.
Blue Origin
Black Hole Found in a Globular Star Cluster
Stellar mass black holes have been discovered, and astronomers now believe that supermassive black holes exist at the centres of most galaxies. But now a black hole has been discovered inside a globular star cluster. This could be one of the elusive „intermediate-mass“ black holes. Globular clusters contain thousands, or even millions of stars, and astronomers never thought they could hold a black hole. Computer simulations predicted that a black hole that formed in the cluster would sink into the centre of the cluster, but then inevitably get slung out into space after gravitational interaction with the stars in the cluster. This new black hole was found by ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, which was able to spot the tell-tale X-ray signature of a black hole. The black hole is located inside a globular cluster in the relatively nearby elliptical galaxy NGC 4472, located about 50 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster. It’s possible that it gained mass by merging with other black holes, and consuming enough material that it could lock its position inside the middle of the galaxy. With enough mass, the stars in the cluster just wouldn’t be able to eject it.
Black hole boldly goes where no black hole has gone before
X-ray Evidence Supports Possible New Class Of Supernova
DEM L238 and DEM L249 are two supernova remnants in the Large Magellanic Cloud. X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra and ESA’s XMM-Newton observatories suggest that the stars responsible for these debris fields were unusually young when they were destroyed by thermonuclear explosions.
https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2007/deml238/
Saturn spectacular
In recognition of the past year, the Cassini imaging team has released an amazing Saturnian photo collection:
Cassini Sends End-of-Year Greetings From Across the Solar System
Opportunity rocks, Spirit rolls
In 2004, two mobile robots landed on Mars and began exploring, a gig expected to last only for three months. That has now stretched into three years and the rovers are on the verge of more important discoveries. Despite mechanical problems and challenges that came close to grounding Opportunity and Spirit, both are still going strong as they start their fourth year. Luck seems to always be with the rovers. Power supplies drop dramatically when dust piles up on the rovers‘ solar panels, but the Martian winds always clean them up. When a wire failed in a motor on Opportunity’s arm, the rover had to pause in its trek towards the large Victoria Crater. The spot where it stopped gave scientists their best example of a pattern in rocks that shows liquid water once flowed on the surface of Mars.
Meanwhile, engineers have written and uploaded new software to teach the rovers smarter ways of operating. For instance, a rover will automatically start exploring a target after reaching it. NASA approved a fourth mission extension for the rovers that will last for a year. The cost so far is $894 million, and $27 million more will continue the mission into 2008…
NASA Mars Team Teaches Old Rovers New Tricks to Kick Off Year Four
First Light for VLT’s Auxiliary Telescope No. 4
On the night of December 15, 2006, the fourth and last-to-be-installed VLT Auxiliary Telescope (AT4) obtained its „First Light“. The first images demonstrate that AT4 will be able to deliver the excellent image quality already delivered by the first three ATs. It will soon join its siblings to perform routinely interferometric measurements.
Little Brother Joins the Large Family
A Blast Over Antarctica As Telescope Soars
At the end of December 2006, a fascinating experiment was conducted over Antarctica by Canada and its partners, the U.S., the U.K., and Mexico. Attached to a huge helium balloon, a large aperture sub-millimetre telescope called BLAST peered deep into space to study the earliest stages of star and planet formation, and to make high-resolution maps of diffuse galactic emissions.
Canadian Space Agency: BLAST Mission 2006 – Antarctica