The Sky Tonight

August 04, 2014

Comet-chaser nears prey after crossing billions of miles
Paris (AFP) Aug 03, 2014
After a decade-long quest spanning six billion kilometres (3.75 billion miles), a European probe will come face to face Wednesday with a comet, one of the Solar System's enigmatic wanderers. The moment will mark a key phase of the most ambitious project ever undertaken by the European Space Agency (ESA) - a 1.3 billion euro ($1.76 billion) bid to get to know these timeless space rovers. More than 400 million km from where it was launched in March 2004, the spacecraft Rosetta will finally meet u ... read more

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New NASA Research Shows Giant Asteroids Battered Early Earth New research shows that more than four billion years ago the surface of Earth was heavily reprocessed - or melted, mixed, and buried - as a result of giant asteroid impacts. A new terrestrial bombar ... more		ALMA Finds Double Star with Weird and Wild Planet-forming Discs Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have found wildly misaligned planet-forming gas discs around the two young stars in the binary system HK Tauri. These new AL ... more		Mapping the optimal route between 2 quantum states As a quantum state collapses from a quantum superposition to a classical state or a different superposition, it will follow a path known as a quantum trajectory. For each start and end state t ... more
				Scientists separate a particle from its properties Researchers from the Vienna University of Technology have performed the first separation of a particle from one of its properties. The study, carried out at the Institute Laue-Langevin (ILL) and pub ... more		Lifetime of gravity measurements heralds new beginning Although ESA's GOCE satellite is no more, all of the measurements it gathered during its life skirting the fringes our atmosphere, including the very last as it drifted slowly back to Earth, have be ... more

CubeSats, SmallSats and MicroSats

Startup in the Land of the Rising Sun; A Japanese Solar Venture - by Bradley L. Bartz

Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison & Memory Foam Mattress Review

Young binary star system may form planets with weird and wild orbits Unlike our solitary Sun, most stars form in binary pairs - two stars that orbit a common center of mass. Though remarkably plentiful, binaries pose a number of questions, including how and where pl ... more		Tidal forces gave moon its shape The shape of the moon deviates from a simple sphere in ways that scientists have struggled to explain. A new study by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows that most of the moon's overall shape can be ... more		Sierra Space clears design milestone for missile tracking satellites in SDA Tranche 2 Top diplomats of North Korea, China agree to oppose 'hegemonism' The Surprising Overlap In Skills Required To Fly An Aircraft And To Excel At iGaming		Mercury's magnetic field tells scientists how its interior is different from Earth's Earth and Mercury are both rocky planets with iron cores, but Mercury's interior differs from Earth's in a way that explains why the planet has such a bizarre magnetic field, UCLA planetary physicis ... more
				MESSENGER Gets Closer to Mercury than Ever Before On July 25, MESSENGER moved closer to Mercury than any spacecraft has before, dropping to an altitude at closest approach of only 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the planet's surface. "The sci ... more		Solar Probe Plus, Highest Energy Mission Ever Several years ago, NASA selected the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of Johns Hopkins University to develop a most ambitious mission to the Sun. This was dubbed the Solar Probe Plus mission, intend ... more

Our galaxy is way smaller than previous estimates The Milky Way is smaller than astronomers previously thought, according to new research. For the first time, scientists have been able to precisely measure the mass of the galaxy that contains our s ... more		Astronomers measure weight of galaxies, expansion of universe Astronomers at the University of British Columbia have collaborated with international researchers to calculate the precise mass of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, dispelling the notion that t ... more		The first animals on Earth may have been sea sponges, study suggests Small Satellite Contracted to Probe Climate Effects of Space Radiation Fengyun satellite strengthens China global weather forecasting capacity		Riddle of bulging Moon solved at last Far from being perfectly round, the Moon has a weird shape, with a highland bulge on the side facing the Earth and another bulge on its far side - a riddle that has fascinated scientists for decades. ... more
Mysterious molecules in space Over the vast, empty reaches of interstellar space, countless small molecules tumble quietly though the cold vacuum. Forged in the fusion furnaces of ancient stars and ejected into space when those ... more		The Quantum Cheshire Cat: Scientists separate a particle from its properties The Quantum Cheshire Cat: Can a particle be separated from its properties? On July 29, the prestigious journal, Nature Communications, published the results of the first Cheshire Cat experiment, sep ... more		Gaia: 'Go' for science Following extensive in-orbit commissioning and several unexpected challenges, ESA's billion-star surveyor, Gaia, is now ready to begin its science mission. The satellite was launched on 19 December ... more		Watching Schrodinger's cat die (or come to life) One of the famous examples of the weirdness of quantum mechanics is the paradox of Schrodinger's cat. If you put a cat inside an opaque box and make his life dependent on a random event, when does t ... more

	Finding quantum lines of desire Groundskeepers and landscapers hate them, but there is no fighting them. Called desire paths, social trails or goat tracks, they are the unofficial shortcuts people create between two locations when ... more		Perseid Meteors vs. the Supermoon Every year, sky watchers and summertime campers circle on their calendars a few key August nights-the 11th, 12th and 13th. These are the dates of the annual Perseid meteor shower, which rarely fails ... more

Worlds most powerful centrifuge begins operations in China

Breakthrough in UAV swarm intelligence as SRI redefines topology mapping

China factory activity shrinks in September for sixth straight month

Collecting just the right data		Titan Offers Clues to Atmospheres of Hazy Planets		Glow in Space is Evidence of A Hot Bubble in Our Galaxy		NASA-funded X-ray Instrument Settles Interstellar Debate		The source of the sky's X-ray glow
Measuring the Smallest Magnets		Refrigerator magnets		A New Approach to SETI: Targeting Alien Polluters		Biomarkers of the Deep		Bepicolombo Integration Testing Completed At Thales

New mass map of a distant galaxy cluster is the most precise yet

Astronomers come up dry in search for water on exoplanets

Hubble Finds Three Surprisingly Dry Exoplanets

Hubble Finds Three Surprisingly Dry Exoplanets

Surface impressions of Rosetta's comet

Mysterious black holes may be exploding into 'white holes'

Measuring Gravitational Waves with eLISA

Alien Atmospheres - Methane, CFCs and other signs of smart ETs

The Most Precise Measurement of an Alien World's Size

Australian researchers pioneer a Google street view of galaxies

Lives and Deaths of Sibling Stars

MIPT-based researcher models Titan's atmosphere

Mysterious dance of dwarfs may force a cosmic rethink

Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012

NEOWISE Spots a Comet That Looked Like an Asteroid

'Challenges' in quest to find water on Earth-like worlds: study

Earth survived near-miss from 2012 solar storm: NASA

Boosting the Force of Empty Space

NASA's Mars orbiters to witness comet flyby

Scientists Find Way to Maintain Quantum Entanglement in Amplified Signals

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