NASA moved the space shuttle Discovery to its launch pad on Thursday in preparation for its next mission in just under a month. Discovery arrived at launch pad 39B after 9 a.m. EDT on Thursday, a little less than nine hours after leaving the Vehicle Assembly Building. Discovery is scheduled to launch on mission STS-116, an ISS assembly flight, on the evening of December 7, 2006. The shuttle crew will deliver a third truss segment, a SPACEHAB module and other key components to the International Space Station.
Solscape
Happy birthday, Venus Express!
One year after its launch on November 9, 2005, and a few months into its science phase, ESA’s Venus Express keeps working well and continues to gather lots of data about the hot and noxious atmosphere of the planet. Newly released images show additional details of the thick cloud deck that surrounds Venus.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Venus_Express/Happy_birthday_Venus_Express
NASA struggles to contact lost Mars probe
An unexpected break in communications has NASA struggling to restore contact with its Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft. If communication cannot be restored soon, NASA may try to diagnose the problem by having another spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), take pictures of MGS. MGS recently had its 10-year anniversary in space. It was launched on November 7, 1996, and has been orbiting Mars since September 1997. It has far outlasted its original mission, which ended in 2000. NASA has repeatedly extended its mission since then.
https://mars.nasa.gov/mgs/newsroom/20061107a.html
VLT Shows Milky Way’s Neighbouring Galaxies Have Different History
A large survey, made with ESO’s VLT, has shed light on our Galaxy’s ancestry. After determining the chemical composition of over 2000 stars in four of the nearest dwarf galaxies to our own, astronomers have demonstrated fundamental differences in their make-up, casting doubt on the theory that these diminutive galaxies could ever have formed the building blocks of our Milky Way Galaxy.
Cut from Different Cloth
Spitzer and Hubble Create Colorful Masterpiece
A new image from NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes looks more like an abstract painting than a cosmic snapshot. The masterpiece shows the Orion nebula in an explosion of infrared, ultraviolet and visible-light colors.
https://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/news/ssc2006-21-spitzer-and-hubble-create-colorful-masterpiece
Evolution in Echtzeit
Bakterien sind ja berühmt-berüchtigt für ihre Fähigkeit, sich an unterschiedliche Umweltbedingungen anzupassen. Wie sie dies bewerkstelligen, haben amerikanische Forscher jetzt erstmals auf Genomebene und in Echtzeit verfolgt. Dabei konnten sie beobachten, wie sich in Bakterienkulturen als Reaktion auf eine „karge Kost“ einige Gene veränderten und sich die Wachstumsrate der Mikroben mehr als verdoppelte. Diese Veränderungen wurden binnen weniger Tage erkennbar. Eine über Nacht gewachsene Bakterienkultur ist also nicht mehr die gleiche wie am Vortag.
Quelle: Herring, C. D., Raghunathan, A., Honisch, C., Patel, T., Applebee, M. K., Joyce, A. J., Albert, T. J., Blattner, F. R., van den Boom, D., Cantor, C. R., Palsson, B. O., „Comparative genome sequencing of Escherichia coli allows observation of bacterial evolution on a laboratory timescale“; Nature Genetics, Nov. 5, 2006.
Monster stellar flare dwarfs all others seen
Scientists using NASA’s Swift satellite have spotted a stellar flare on a nearby star so powerful that, had it been from our sun, it would have triggered a mass extinction on Earth. The flare was perhaps the most energetic magnetic stellar explosion ever detected. The flare was seen in December 2005 on a star slightly less massive than the sun, in a two-star system called II Pegasi in the constellation Pegasus. It was about a hundred million times more energetic than the sun’s typical solar flare, releasing energy equivalent to about 50 million trillion atomic bombs. Fortunately, our sun is now a stable star that doesn’t produce such powerful flares. And II Pegasi is at a safe distance of about 135 light-years from Earth.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/monster_flare.html
Gewichtige Geschwister für Protonen und Neutronen
Amerikanische Forscher haben mit Hilfe des Tevatron-Teilchenbeschleunigers des Fermilabs eine neue Klasse von Baryonen entdeckt. Die beim Zusammenprall von Protonen mit ihren Antiteilchen nur für Sekundenbruchteile existierenden Teilchen wurden auf den Namen „Sigma-b-Baryonen“ getauft und bestehen aus jeweils drei Quarks, von denen eines das schwere Bottom-Quark ist. Die Wissenschaftler glauben, mit Hilfe der neuen Teilchen eine der grundlegenden Kräfte der Natur, die sog. Starke Wechselwirkung (auch Starke Kernkraft oder Starke Kraft genannt), genauer untersuchen zu können.
Mercury will pass in front of the Sun
A rare passage of Mercury in front of the Sun as seen from Earth will take place on Wednesday, November 8, 2006. The last time such a transit of Mercury occurred was in 2003 and it will not reoccur until 2016. Mercury will appear as a tiny black circle just 1/200th the width of the Sun. It will take almost five hours for Mercury’s orbital motion to carry it completely across the Sun from Earth’s point of view. Mercury’s transit on November 8 will be visible from a broad swath of Earth that includes the Americas, Australia and eastern Asia. It will not be visible in Europe, Africa or the Middle East. Mercury will start moving across the Sun’s face at 19:12 GMT. For observers in the Americas, the Sun will set before Mercury finishes its transit, except for those on the west coast of North America. For observers in eastern Asia and most of Australia, the transit will already be underway by the time the Sun rises. Mercury will leave the Sun’s face at 00:10 GMT on Friday. Observing the transit will require a telescope or binoculars and special precautions – looking directly at the Sun can cause permanent vision damage!
Here you can view the transit live online:
http://annex.exploratorium.edu/transit/
First Light Looks Bright for Hinode
Japan’s newly-launched Hinode spacecraft has captured its first images of the Sun. Formerly known as Solar-B, the spacecraft launched on September 22, and opened its instruments to space on October 23, 2006. The images show granules on the Sun’s surface, each of which is thousands of kilometres across. Over the course of the next month, mission controllers will continue to put the spacecraft through its paces. They expect to release their first scientific data in December.
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/02nov_firstlight/