An atlas of the asteroid, Vesta, created from images taken during the Dawn Mission's Low Altitude Mapping Orbit (LAMO), is now accessible for the public to explore online. The set of maps has been created from mosaics of 10 000 images from Dawn's framing camera (FC) instrument, taken at an average altitude of about 210 kilometres.
Sep 12th, 2013
Read more
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered the largest known population of globular star clusters, an estimated 160,000, swarming like bees inside the crowded core of the giant grouping of galaxies Abell 1689. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy hosts about 150 such clusters.
Sep 12th, 2013
Read more
Glimpses of the nursery of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago are coming from an unlikely venue almost 1 billion miles away, according to the leader of an effort to understand Titan, one of the most unusual moons in the solar system.
Sep 12th, 2013
Read more
Sessions at the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) 2013 today encouraged dialogue between the entrepreneurs who are exploring alternative ways to reach the Moon, Mars and beyond and the scientists that may become their future potential customers for the commercial flight of science instrumentation, as well as providing key data to enable the missions.
Sep 12th, 2013
Read more
While biomarkers have never been spotted in observations of an exoplanet, because their signal is so faint, the new generation of telescopes being planned today, such as the European Extremely Large Telescope, may be sensitive enough to detect them. New research presented to the European Planetary Science Congress at UCL by Lee Grenfell (DLR) aims to explore how such biomarkers might be detected in future.
Sep 12th, 2013
Read more
Two groups of astronomers have used data from ESO telescopes to make the best three-dimensional map yet of the central parts of the Milky Way. They have found that the inner regions take on a peanut-like, or X-shaped, appearance from some angles. This odd shape was mapped by using public data from ESO's VISTA survey telescope along with measurements of the motions of hundreds of very faint stars in the central bulge.
Sep 12th, 2013
Read more
New research outlines a new design of spatio-temporal models of astrophysical plasmas.
Sep 12th, 2013
Read more
The US space agency has narrowed its hunt for an asteroid to capture to three, NASA said. The asteroids fit the requirements of being between seven to 10 meters in size, and further study should be able to narrow the choice even more.
Sep 12th, 2013
Read more
ESA astronaut Jean-Fran�ois Clervoy and ESA astronaut instructor Herv� Stevenin slipped into the roles of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin last week for an underwater simulation of the historic mission to the Moon.
Sep 12th, 2013
Read more
Astronomers have discovered the fundamental process responsible for the smooth, steady fade of older disk galaxies. They say the key is the clumps of interstellar gases and new stars within young galaxy disks.
Sep 11th, 2013
Read more
An important discovery has been made concerning the possible inventory of molecules available to the early Earth. Scientists found that the Sutter's Mill meteorite, which exploded in a blazing fireball over California last year, contains organic molecules not previously found in any meteorites. These findings suggest a far greater availability of extraterrestrial organic molecules than previously thought possible, an inventory that could indeed have been important in molecular evolution and life itself.
Sep 10th, 2013
Read more
Water found in ancient Moon rocks might have actually originated from the proto-Earth and even survived the Moon-forming event.
Sep 10th, 2013
Read more
An instrument similar to those used on Earth by art detectives and to sense explosives at airports will be taken into space for the first time by ExoMars, the European Space Agency's mission to Mars in 2018. This Raman spectrometer will help space scientists to hunt for traces of Martian life.
Sep 10th, 2013
Read more
A novel, hybrid part-human, part-machine visual system that uses a simple mobile phone camera has been developed to search for evidence of past or present life in planetary analogue sites on Earth.
Sep 10th, 2013
Read more
Unresolved questions about the nature of supermassive black holes, gravitational monsters at the heart of nearly all large galaxies, were at the forefront of a recent conference at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Sep 10th, 2013
Read more
Mars rovers, such as Curiosity, currently can't make science decisions on their own. That has to change if future rover missions are to make discoveries further out in the solar system, scientists say. To help future rover missions spend less time waiting for instructions from Earth, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., developed an advanced two-lens camera, called TextureCam, that can think about the pictures it snaps and make science-based decisions.
Sep 9th, 2013
Read more
Heidelberg scientists develop theoretical model to interpret data from the Planck satellite.
Sep 9th, 2013
Read more
The amount of sunlight being absorbed or reflected by Earth is one of the driving forces for weather and climate. Satellites are providing this information with unprecedented accuracy.
Sep 6th, 2013
Read more