The Sky Tonight

April 06, 2015

Scary times for Europe's comet-chaser Rosetta
Paris (AFP) April 2, 2015
Europe's pioneering probe Rosetta battled breakdowns with navigation and communication with Earth after it ran into blasts of dust and gas from the comet it is tracking, mission control said Thursday. Swooping close to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Rosetta "experienced significant difficulties" last weekend, the European Space Agency (ESA) said. "The spacecraft has now been successfully recovered, but it will take a little longer to resume normal scientific operations," ESA said in a blog. ... read more

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Astronomers discover likely precursors of galaxy clusters we see today By combining observations of the distant Universe made with ESA's Herschel and Planck space observatories, cosmologists have discovered what could be the precursors of the vast clusters of galaxies ... more		New explanation for Mercury's dark surface Peering into space, the surface of Mercury appears dark and unreflective, an observation that has long puzzled planetary scientists due to the planet's very low surface abundance of iron (less than ... more		Dusty substructure in a galaxy far far away Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) have combined high-resolution images from the ALMA telescopes with a new scheme for undoing the distorting effects of a powerful gravita ... more
				Soft Landing on the Moon an Extraordinary Challenge Chinese Chang'e 3 spacecraft on Dec. 14, 2013 became the first probe to soft land on the Moon since the Soviet Union's Luna 24 in 1976. Other missions could follow its footsteps soon as the commerci ... more		OSIRIS-REx Mission Passes Critical Milestone NASA's groundbreaking science mission to retrieve a sample from an ancient space rock has moved closer to fruition. The Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Expl ... more

Space Tech Expo - Design - Build - Test - Long Beach CA - May 19-21, 2015

Human 2 Mars Conference Mat 5-7 2015 - Washington DC

ALMA Disentangles Complex Birth of Giant Stars A research group led by Aya Higuchi, a researcher at Ibaraki University, conducted observations of the massive-star forming region IRAS 16547-4247 with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Arr ... more		Quantum teleportation on a chip The core circuits of quantum teleportation, which generate and detect quantum entanglement, have been successfully integrated into a photonic chip by an international team of scientists from the uni ... more		EU states to hold talks on 'drone wall' to protect bloc Denmark military intel fails to identify source of drone flights Lithuania eases rules on shooting down drones		Dark matter even darker than once thought Astronomers using observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have studied how dark matter in clusters of galaxies behaves when the clusters collide. T ... more
				Comet dust: Planet Mercury's 'invisible paint' A team of scientists has a new explanation for the planet Mercury's dark, barely reflective surface. In a paper published in Nature Geoscience, the researchers suggest that a steady dusting of carbo ... more		Stop blaming the moon "It must be a full moon" is a common refrain when things appear more hectic than usual. The moon is even blamed when things get crazy at hospital emergency rooms or birth wards. "Some nurses ascribe ... more

Army Network Modernization 2015 - Washington DC June 23-25

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NSF-Funded Physics Frontiers Center Expands Hunt for Gravitational Waves The search for gravitational waves-elusive ripples in the fabric of space-time predicted to arise from extremely energetic and large-scale cosmic events such as the collisions of neutron stars and b ... more		Saturn Spacecraft Returns to the Realm of Icy Moons A dual view of Saturn's icy moon Rhea marks the return of NASA's Cassini spacecraft to the realm of the planet's icy satellites. This follows nearly two years during which the spacecraft's orbits ca ... more		Earthlike 'Star Wars' Tatooines may be common Luke Skywalker's home in "Star Wars" is the desert planet Tatooine, with twin sunsets because it orbits two stars. So far, only uninhabitable gas-giant planets have been identified circling such bin ... more		MESSENGER Completes 4,000th Orbit of Mercury On March 25, the MESSENGER spacecraft completed its 4,000th orbit of Mercury, and the lowest point in its orbit continues to move closer to the planet than ever before. The orbital phase of the MESS ... more

	Engineers speed up simulations in computational grand challenge Engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have developed a new family of methods to significantly increase the speed of time-resolved numerical simulations in computational grand challen ... more		Astronomers Upgrade Their Cosmic Light Bulbs The brilliant explosions of dead stars have been used for years to illuminate the far-flung reaches of our cosmos. The explosions, called Type Ia supernovae, allow astronomers to measure the distanc ... more

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Black hole winds pull the plug on star formation		NASA's Hubble, Chandra Find Clues that May Help Identify Dark Matter		Science: Theory of the strong interaction verified		Automation offers big solution to big data in astronomy		Physicists solve low-temperature magnetic mystery
Quantum experiment verifies Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance'		Thousands of atoms entangled with a single photon		A new spin on Saturn's peculiar rotation		Chemical Fingerprints of Ancient Supernovae Found		Explosions of Jupiter's aurora linked to extraordinary planet-moon interaction

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Dark matter not as sticky as once thought

Help Name New Features on Pluto

Supermassive black hole clears star-making gas from galaxy's core

NASA-Funded Mission Studies the Sun in Soft X-Rays

Behind the dogmas of good old hydrodynamics

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I Zw 18 - The Galaxy that Reveals the Universe's History

NASA plans to bring boulder into moon orbit

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Better debugger

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Surviving in hostile territory

Processing Paradigms That Accelerate Computer Simulations

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