The Sky Tonight

February 13, 2014

Rock from heavens is a scientists' delight
Paris (AFP) Feb 12, 2014
A year ago on Saturday, inhabitants of the Russian city of Chelyabinsk looked skyward, some frozen in fear that a nuclear war had begun. Overhead, an asteroid exploded in a ball of fire, sending debris plummeting to Earth in brilliant streaks. The shockwave blew out windows, hurting about 1,600 people, and the burst of ultraviolet light was so strong that more than two dozen people suffered skin burns. Today, enshrined in Russia's folk memory as a big scare, the Chelyabinsk Meteorite, for sp ... read more

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ANU astronomers discover oldest star A team led by astronomers at The Australian National University has discovered the oldest known star in the Universe, which formed shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. The discovery ha ... more		Massive neutrinos solve a cosmological conundrum Scientists have solved a major problem with the current standard model of cosmology identified by combining results from the Planck spacecraft and measurements of gravitational lensing in order to d ... more		Source of 'Moon Curse' Revealed by Eclipse Strange events have long been linked to nights of a full moon, though careful scrutiny dispels any association. So, when signals bounced off the lunar surface returned surprisingly faint echoes on f ... more
				NASA Spacecraft Get a 360-Degree View of Saturn's Auroras NASA trained several pairs of eyes on Saturn as the planet put on a dancing light show at its poles. While NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting around Earth, was able to observe the northern auro ... more		Researchers identify one of the earliest stars in the universe As the Big Bang's name suggests, the universe burst into formation from an immense explosion, creating a vast soup of particles. Gigantic clouds of primordial soup, made mainly of hydrogen and heliu ... more

Spaceplan 2020 - Space Technology Symposium

Red skies discovered on extreme brown dwarf A peculiar example of a celestial body, known as a brown dwarf, with unusually red skies has been discovered by a team of astronomers from the University of Hertfordshire's Centre for Astrophysics R ... more		Hubble Looks in on a Nursery for Unruly Young Stars This striking new image, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, reveals a star in the process of forming within the Chameleon cloud. This young star is throwing off narrow streams of gas f ... more		Northrop Grumman Hypersonic Navigation System Exceeds Rocket Test Milestones We can build fighter jet without Germany: France's Dassault Moldova backs EU in elections marred by Russian interference		Maxwell Tech Provides Computer Power To ESA Astronomy Mission Maxwell Technologies has supplied seven powerful single board computers that are providing processing power for the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia satellite, which lifted off on December 19, 201 ... more
				GOES EXIS Quadruplets Together in a Cleanroom "Nursery" Four Extreme Ultraviolet and X-ray Irradiance Sensors or EXIS instruments that will fly aboard four of NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R or GOES-R Series spacecraft were rec ... more		A New Look at an Old Friend Just weeks after NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory began operations in 1999, the telescope pointed at Centaurus A (Cen A, for short). This galaxy, at a distance of about 12 million light years from E ... more

CubeSats, SmallSats and MicroSats

International Conference on Protection of Materials and Structures From Space Environment

Developing the Next-Generation Military Radar while Maintaining Current Systems; IDGA�s Military Radar Summit - April 2014

MESSENGER Surpasses 200,000 Orbital Images of Mercury MESSENGER has now returned more than 200,000 images acquired from orbit about Mercury. The 1996 proposal for the mission promised a return of at least 1,000 images says Robert Gold, MESSENGER's Scie ... more		NASA bets on private companies to exploit moon's resources NASA - building on successful partnerships with private companies to resupply the International Space Station - is now looking to private entrepreneurs to help exploit resources on the moon. ... 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		'Oldest star' found from iron fingerprint: astronomers Australian astronomers on Sunday said they had found a star 13.6 billion years old, making it the most ancient star ever seen. ... more
				Astronomers discover new brown dwarf -- except this one is red Astronomers in Britain report they've discovered a peculiar example of a celestial body known as a brown dwarf, one with unusually red skies. ... more		Russian scientists break ground in new asteriod discovery A new name has appeared in the registry of minor planets. Researchers at the Ussuriysky Astrophysics Observatory of the Far Eastern chapter of the Russian Academy of Scientists have discovered a new ... more

Thanks America, New Horizons Ahead

Countdown to Pluto

A Busy Year Begins for New Horizons

New Technique Could Be Used to Search Space Dust for Life's Ingredients

Planetary Protection: Preventing Microbes Hitchhiking to Space

Sun's closest neighbor could harbor 'superhabitable' world

Kepler Finds a Very Wobbly Planet

One planet, two stars: new research shows how circumbinary planets form

First Weather Map of Brown Dwarf

Flowing Water on Mars Appears Likely But Hard to Prove

Russian-European spacecraft to go on Martian mission in Jan 2016

100 Days Of Mars Orbiter Spacecraft

	Heavy Metal in the Early Cosmos Ab initio: "From the beginning." It's a term used in science to describe calculations that rely on established mathematical laws of nature, or "first principles," without additional assumptions or s ... more		Solving a physics mystery: Those 'solitons' are really vortex rings The same physics that gives tornadoes their ferocious stability lies at the heart of new University of Washington research, and could lead to a better understanding of nuclear dynamics in studying f ... more		Researchers Find Unambiguous Evidence for Coherent Phonons in Superlattices We all learn in high school science about the dual nature of light - that it exists as both waves and quantum particles called photons. It is this duality of light that enables the coherent transpor ... more		Astrobotic Begins Testing at Masten Space Systems When Astrobotic's Griffin lander descends to the lunar surface, it will precisely target a small landing ellipse (a small area where it might land) and autonomously maneuver to avoid hazards such as ... 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

A Proposal For The Space Debris Society		Kepler Finds a Very Wobbly Planet		Quarks in the looking glass		NASA Extends Moon Exploring Satellite Mission		Study Finds Early Universe "Warmed Up" Later Than Previously Theorized
One planet, two stars: new research shows how circumbinary planets form		The Anatomy of an Asteroid		Google mystery barge may be homeless		Rice lab clocks 'hot' electrons		Getting ready for asteroids

New Technique Could Be Used to Search Space Dust for Life's Ingredients

Riding a blue-green wake of xenon to Ceres

Storage system for 'big data' dramatically speeds access to information

NASA Posts Final Asteroid Workshop Report

Russia, US to join forces against space threats

First Weather Map of Brown Dwarf

Planetary Protection: Preventing Microbes Hitchhiking to Space

Rogue asteroids may be the norm

NASA to study almost absolute zero matter at ISS

Where the Wild Stars Are

Universe's early galaxies grew massive through collisions

NASA's LRO Snaps a Picture of NASA's LADEE Spacecraft

NASA and ESA Space Telescopes Help Solve Mystery of Burned-Out Galaxies

Sun's closest neighbor could harbor 'superhabitable' world

Cassini's View of Weird and Wonderful Saturn

Sole camera from NASA moon missions to be auctioned

Asteroid Diversity Points to a "Snow Globe" Solar System

Rosetta wide awake as check-up continues

NASA-Sponsored 'Disk Detective' Lets Public Search for New Planetary Nurseries

Solving a 30-year-old problem in massive star formation

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