The Sky Tonight

October 21, 2013

Is the 'Christmas Comet' cracking up?
Paris (AFP) Oct 22, 2013
An incoming comet that skygazers had hoped would provide one of the greatest celestial shows of the century, could be a fizzle. So say astronomers tracking the eagerly-awaited Comet ISON as it races to a searing encounter with the Sun. Formally known as C/2012 S1 (ISON), the comet was spotted by a pair of hard-working amateur Russian astronomers, Vitaly Nevski and Artyom Novichonok, on September 21, 2012. It is called ISON because they used a telescope called the International Scientific Opt ... read more

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Out-of-fuel European satellite to come crashing down A satellite monitoring Earth's gravity field since 2009 will run out of fuel "in the coming days" and eventually crash, with little risk to humans, the European Space Agency said Friday. ... more		LADEE Continues To Settle Into Operational Lunar Orbit During the NASA shutdown, the LADEE mission continued to perform its critical maneuvers and capture into the commissioning orbit around the moon. The trajectory correction maneuver (TCM-1) was compl ... more		Queen's University scientists shed new light on star death Astronomers at Queen's University Belfast have shed new light on the rarest and brightest exploding stars ever discovered in the universe. The research is published in Nature Magazine - one of the w ... more
				Sky Survey Captures Key Details of Cosmic Explosions Developed to help scientists learn more about the complex nature of celestial objects in the universe, astronomical surveys have been cataloguing the night sky since the beginning of the 20th centur ... more		New survey tools unveil two celestial explosions A team of researchers including Carnegie's Mansi Kasliwal and John Mulchaey used a novel astronomical survey software system-the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF)-to link a new stripped- ... more

CubeSats, SmallSats and MicroSats

Most distant gravitational lens helps weigh galaxies An international team of astronomers has found the most distant gravitational lens yet - a galaxy that, as predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, deflects and intensifies the l ... more		ALMA probes mysteries of jets from giant black holes There are supermassive black holes - with masses up to several billion solar masses - at the hearts of almost all galaxies in the Universe, including our own galaxy, the Milky Way. In the re ... more		Denmark closes airspace to civilian drones amid rise in sightings Top diplomats of North Korea, China agree to oppose 'hegemonism' What is the high seas treaty?		Finding alien worlds on Earth Have you ever wondered which places on Earth most resemble other planets? For some of us, imagining the landscape of other worlds might just be for fun, but scientists and engineers wonder about wha ... more
				Comet ISON Appears Intact A new image of the sunward plunging Comet ISON suggests that the comet is intact despite some predictions that the fragile icy nucleus might disintegrate as the Sun warms it. The comet will pass clo ... more		Gravitational waves help understand black-hole weight gain Supermassive black holes: every large galaxy's got one. But here's a real conundrum: how did they grow so big? A paper in the latest issue of Science pits the front-running ideas about the growth of ... more

Space Situational Awareness Conference 2013

Solar systems for home and business

Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison & Memory Foam Mattress Review

Astronomer see misaligned planets in distant system data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system featuring multiple planets orbiting at a severe tilt to their host star. ... more		Chelyabinsk meteorite fragment weighing almost 600 kg lifted from Lake Chebarkul Moscow (Voice of Russia) Oct 18, 2013 A giant fragment of the Chelyabinsk meteorite was lifted from the bottom of Lake Chebarkul near the city of Chelyabinsk in the Russian Urals Mountains on Wedne ... more		The first animals on Earth may have been sea sponges, study suggests Wildfire-induced thunderstorms recreated in Earth system models for first time Fengyun satellite strengthens China global weather forecasting capacity		Spacecraft images of asteroid reinforce telescope observations NASA scientists say a spacecraft's close-up view of an asteroid can work with ground-based telescopes to clarify our understanding of a solar system object. ... more
				Astronomers find clues to decades-long coronal heating mystery Drs. Michael Hahn and Daniel Wolf Savin, research scientists at Columbia University's Astrophysics Laboratory in New York, NY, found evidence that magnetic waves in a polar coronal hole contain enou ... more		The active Sun boosts Titan's outer atmosphere The NASA-ESA-ASI Cassini spacecraft has been observing the Saturn system, including the giant satellite Titan, for more than 9 years. A detailed analysis of Cassini data has now confirmed prediction ... more

SwRI study finds that Pluto satellites' orbital ballet may hint of long-ago collisions

Archival Hubble Images Reveal Neptune's "Lost" Inner Moon

New Horizons - Late in Cruise, and a Binary Ahoy

Finding alien worlds on Earth

LSU Researchers Discover How Microbes Survive in Freezing Conditions

Methane seeps of the deep sea: A bacteria feast for lithodid crabs

Astronomer see misaligned planets in distant system

Water discovered in remnants of extrasolar rocky world orbiting white dwarf

Space 'graveyard' reveals bits of an Earth-like planet

Russia to make another attempt to bring back Mars moon material

Curiosity rover finds proof of Mars origin of meteorites

Phobos-Grunt-2: Russia to probe Martian moon by 2022

	British engineers hope to reboot 50-year-old computer Engineers in Britain said they are working to reboot a 50-year-old computer nicknamed Flossie, one of the oldest surviving mass-produced computers. ... more		Two new cosmic explosions unveiled in sky survey analysis Astronomers say software analysis of sky surveys created by telescopes in California has allowed them to link a supernova to the star from which it exploded. ... more		Biggest star is ripping itself apart - astronomer The biggest known star in the cosmos is in its death throes and will eventually explode, astronomers said on Wednesday. ... more		Russia pulls huge 'Chelyabinsk meteor chunk' from lake Russian divers Wednesday pulled from a murky lake in the Urals a half-tonne suspected meteorite said to have been part of a meteor whose ground-shaking shockwave hurt 1,200 people in February. ... more

NASA ISRO radar satellite beams first Earth images from space

India plans mega-dam to counter China water fears

Breakthrough in UAV swarm intelligence as SRI redefines topology mapping

Quantum particles find safety in numbers		Scientists prove Heisenberg's intuition correct		Telescopes Large and Small Team Up to Study Triple Asteroid 87 Sylvia		Comet ISON Details Emerge as it Races Toward the Sun		Rosetta: 100 days to wake-up
Water discovered in remnants of extrasolar rocky world orbiting white dwarf		LSU Researchers Discover How Microbes Survive in Freezing Conditions		Watery asteroid discovered in dying star points to habitable exoplanets		European 'big bang' space telescope to be switched off		Approaching Earth flyby to slingshot Juno to Jupiter

Quantum computers: Trust is good, proof is better

Controllers prepare to awaken comet hunter from deep-space sleep

A close look at the Toby Jug Nebula

Scientists generate first map of clouds on an exoplanet

Methane seeps of the deep sea: A bacteria feast for lithodid crabs

Space 'graveyard' reveals bits of an Earth-like planet

Diamond 'super-earth' may not be quite as precious

Evidence for a new nuclear 'magic number'

Comet ISON's chances of surviving close brush with the Sun

Soft shells and strange star clusters

NASA's moon landing remembered as a promise of a 'future which never happened'

First ever evidence of a comet striking Earth

Search for alien life more complicated than thought, scientists say

Lonely planet without a star discovered wandering our galaxy

First-ever comet material discovered on Earth: scientists

Englert And Higgs Awarded Nobel Prize In Physics For 2013

Recent Study Reduces Casimir Force to Lowest Recorded Level

Louisiana Tech physicists aid in new findings of international research team

Russia could build manned lunar base

Researchers Find that Bright Nearby Double Star Fomalhaut Is Actually a Triple

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