The Sky Tonight

February 16, 2014

A good year to find a comet
Paris (ESA) Feb 16, 2014
A team of European astronomers has found a previously unknown comet, detected as a tiny blob of light orbiting our Sun deep in the Solar System. Europe's Teide Observatory Tenerife Asteroid Survey team has been credited with discovering comet P/2014 C1, named 'TOTAS' in recognition of the teamwork involved in the find. The comet was unexpectedly discovered on 1 February during a routine set of observations using the 1 m-diameter telescope at ESA's Optical Ground Station, Tenerife, Spain. The ... read more

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Space junk endangers mankind's usual course of life The Russian cargo spacecraft Progress M-20M, which undocked from the International Space Station on February 3, has ended its free flight and is to be sunk in the unnavigated part of the Pacific Oce ... more		IBEX Helps Paint Picture of the Magnetic System Beyond the Solar Wind Understanding the region of interstellar space through which the solar system travels is no easy task. Interstellar space begins beyond the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles surrounding t ... more		Software helps astronomers find faint, tiny comet in deep solar system A team of European astronomers reports software helped them see what the eye could not, a previously unknown comet orbiting the sun deep in the solar system. ... more
				How Stellar Death Can Lead To Twin Celestial Jets Astronomers know that while large stars can end their lives as violently cataclysmic supernovae, smaller stars end up as planetary nebulae - colorful, glowing clouds of dust and gas. In recent decad ... more		Four new galaxy clusters take researchers further back in time Four unknown galaxy clusters each potentially containing thousands of individual galaxies have been discovered some 10 billion light years from Earth. An international team of astronomers, led ... more

Spaceplan 2020 - Space Technology Symposium

A global map of Jupiter's biggest moon Scientists, including Brown University geologists and students, have completed the first global geological map of Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon and the largest in the solar system. With i ... more		Scientists reveal cosmic roadmap to galactic magnetic field Scientists on NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission, including a team leader from the University of New Hampshire, report that recent, independent measurements have validated one of t ... 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		Scientists use 'voting' and 'penalties' to overcome quantum errors Seeking a solution to decoherence-the "noise" that prevents quantum processors from functioning properly-scientists at USC have developed a strategy of linking quantum bits together into voting bloc ... more
				Rock from heavens is a scientists' delight A year ago on Saturday, inhabitants of the Russian city of Chelyabinsk looked skyward, some frozen in fear that a nuclear war had begun. ... more		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

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

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		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		Data links quick fix Software that can fix 90 percent of broken links in the web of data, assuming the resources are still on the site's server, has been developed by researchers in Iran. The details are reported this m ... 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

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

NASA solves mystery of Mars 'doughnut' rock

'Pinnacle Island' Rock Studies Continue

Calculated Risks: How Radiation Rules Mars Exploration

	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		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

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 New Look at an Old Friend		MESSENGER Surpasses 200,000 Orbital Images of Mercury		NASA bets on private companies to exploit moon's resources		'Oldest star' found from iron fingerprint: astronomers		Astronomers discover new brown dwarf -- except this one is red
Russian scientists break ground in new asteriod discovery		Heavy Metal in the Early Cosmos		Solving a physics mystery: Those 'solitons' are really vortex rings		Researchers Find Unambiguous Evidence for Coherent Phonons in Superlattices		Astrobotic Begins Testing at Masten Space Systems

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

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