Grand Canyon Stargazers

(Video above from April 22, 2010)

The X-37B mini space shuttle made a stealth landing during the early morning hours, landing at Vandenberg Air Force base at 1:16 a.m. PDT (0916 GMT) today (Friday, Dec. 3.) The US Air Force’s first unmanned space plane successfully glided to a landing after nearly 225 days in space.

X-37B program manager Lt Col Troy Giese stated moments after landing, “We are very pleased that the program completed all the on-orbit objectives for the first mission.”

Universe Today
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(PhysOrg.com) — An exoplanet orbiting a star that entered our Milky Way from another galaxy has been detected by a European team of astronomers using the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The Jupiter-like planet is particularly unusual, as it is orbiting a star nearing the end of its life and could be about to be engulfed by it, giving tantalizing clues about the fate of our own planetary system in the distant future.

Over the last 15 years, astronomers have detected nearly 500 planets orbiting stars in our cosmic neighbourhood, but none outside our Milky Way has been confirmed. Now, however, a planet with a minimum mass 1.25 times that of Jupiter has been discovered orbiting a star of extragalactic origin, even though the star now finds itself within our own galaxy. It is part of the so-called Helmi stream — a group of stars that originally belonged to a dwarf galaxy that was devoured by our galaxy, the Milky Way, in an act of galactic cannibalism about six to nine billion years ago. The results are published today in Science Express.

“This discovery is very exciting,” says Rainer Klement of the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (MPIA), who was responsible for the selection of the target stars for this study. “For the first time, astronomers have detected a planetary system in a stellar stream of extragalactic origin. Because of the great distances involved, there are no confirmed detections of planets in other galaxies. But this cosmic merger has brought an extragalactic planet within our reach.”

The star is known as HIP 13044, and it lies about 2000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Fornax (the Furnace). The astronomers detected the planet, called HIP 13044 b, by looking for the tiny telltale wobbles of the star caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting companion. For these precise observations, the team used the high-resolution spectrograph FEROS attached to the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

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Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., expect the Cassini spacecraft will resume normal operations on Nov. 24. They have traced the steps taken by an onboard computer before Cassini put itself in precautionary “safe mode” last week.

Mission managers determined that the spacecraft went into safe mode because of a flip of a bit in the command and data system computer. The bit flip prevented the computer from registering an important instruction, and the spacecraft, as programmed, went into the standby mode. Engineers are still working to understand why the bit flipped.

Since the spacecraft went into safe mode on Nov. 2, the onboard computer with the bit flip has been reset and one of the science instruments has been turned back on to keep it warm. Over the next week or so, engineers will bring the rest of the science instruments back online.

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More information: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini

(PHYORG.COM) NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has eyed its first cool brown dwarf: a tiny, ultra-cold star floating all alone in space.

WISE is scanning the whole sky in infrared light, picking up the glow of not just brown dwarfs but also asteroids, stars and galaxies. It has sent millions of images down to Earth, in which infrared light of different wavelengths is color-coded in the images.

“The brown dwarfs jump out at you like big, fat, green emeralds,” said Amy Mainzer, the deputy project scientist of WISE at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Mainzer, who makes jewelry in her spare time, explained that the brown dwarfs appear like green gems in WISE images because the methane in their atmospheres absorbs the infrared light that has been coded blue, and because they are too faint to give off the infrared light that is color-coded red. The only color left is green.
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(AFP) – 2 hours ago

CAPE CANAVERAL — A NASA spacecraft made a successful fly-by Thursday of the Hartley 2 comet and within minutes began sending to Earth arresting images taken as the enormous space rock hurtled along the outer fringes of the solar system.

“The mission team and scientists have worked hard for this day,” said Tim Larson, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, which is monitoring the mission that saw the EPOXI probe fly billions of miles to capture images of the comet.

“It’s good to see Hartley 2 up close,” Larson said.

The EPOXI — its full name is Extrasolar Planet Observation and Deep Impact Extended Investigation — reached the Hartley 2 after a 2.5-year journey across the solar system, a distance of some 4.6 billion kilometers (2.9 billion miles).

The EPOXI mission flew within about 435 miles (700 kilometers) of the comet at about 10 am (1400 GMT) Thursday and about an hour later began sending back its never-before-seen computer images.

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Commercial space travel took a step closer with the opening of the runway at the world’s first spaceport in the US state of New Mexico.

The event was marked with a flypast of an aircraft carrying SpaceShip Two.

The vehicle has been designed to take fee-paying tourists on trips to the edge of space and back.

British billionaire Sir Richard Branson – whose Virgin group has backed the venture – said the first passenger trip should take place within 18 months.

The opening of the nearly two-mile (three-kilometre) runway comes less than two weeks after another major step for Sir Richard’s Virgin Galactic company: the first solo glide flight of SpaceShip Two.

“Today is very personal as our dream becomes more real,” Sir Richard said.

BBC News

A space ambassador could be appointed by the United Nations to act as the first point of contact for aliens trying to communicate with Earth.

Mazlan Othman, a Malaysian astrophysicist, is set to be tasked with co-ordinating humanity’s response if and when extraterrestrials make contact.

Aliens who landed on earth and asked: “Take me to your leader” would be directed to Mrs Othman.

She will set out the details of her proposed new role at a Royal Society conference in Buckinghamshire next week.
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