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News Archive: Jan. 1-31 |
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Cassini spacecraft finds rhythm in Saturn's rings
Order can be found in the most unexpected places, as demonstrated by our neighbor three planets down. Two of Saturn's rings have been found by NASA's Cassini spacecraft to contain orderly lines of densely grouped, boulder-size icy particles that extend outward across the rings like ripples from a rock dropped in a calm pond.
 FULL STORY
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Mysteries and surprises found during Mercury flyby
A treasure trove of data captured by NASA's Messenger probe as it zoomed past Mercury earlier this month revealed a mysterious world fraught with scars, leaving researchers with more questions about the solar system's innermost planet.
FULL STORY
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 VIDEO:
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Atlantis tentatively cleared for launch next week
Exhaustive testing shows the low-level fuel sensor problem that derailed two attempts to launch the shuttle Atlantis in December has been resolved, NASA managers said Wednesday. But a decision on whether to press ahead with a third launch try Feb. 7 was put off to Saturday pending results of last-minute troubleshooting to assess the health of a kinked flex hose in the ship's coolant system.
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STS-122 QUICK-LOOK
THE ASTRONAUT CREW
MISSION FLIGHT PLAN
SHUTTLE ASCENT DATA
LAUNCH WINDOWS CHART
COUNTDOWN TIMELINE
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POST-FLIGHT READINESS REVIEW BRIEFING PLAY
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STS-122 ASTRONAUT BIOGRAPHIES PLAY
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NARRATED OVERVIEW OF ATLANTIS' MISSION PLAY
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INSIGHTS INTO COLUMBUS SCIENCE LABORATORY PLAY
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Spacewalkers replace broken station motor
Working in orbital darkness to minimize the risk of electric shock, astronauts Peggy Whitson and Dan Tani removed a faulty solar array positioning motor Wednesday and replaced it with a spare unit. The new motor is needed to boost the station's electrical generation enough to support the planned launches of European and Japanese research modules in February, March and April.
SPACEWALK ENDS
TESTS SUCCESSFUL
NEW MOTOR INSTALLED
FAILED MOTOR REMOVED
SPACEWALK BEGINS
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POST-SPACEWALK RECAP BRIEFING PLAY
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REMOVED BMRRM PLACED IN STOWAGE CONTAINER PLAY
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THE NEW REPLACEMENT BMRRM MOTOR IS INSTALLED PLAY
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FAILED BMRRM MOTOR REMOVED FROM STATION PLAY
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SPACEWALKERS PREP OLD BMRRM FOR REMOVAL PLAY
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PREVIEW OF THE BMRRM REPLACEMENT SPACEWALK PLAY
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ULA restructures Delta 2 program for long term
United Launch Alliance has announced the restructuring of its Delta 2 program, building upon its mission success record to make it more cost effective in a challenging market.
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DELTA LAUNCH ARCHIVE
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Unusual supernovae may reveal black holes
A strange and violent fate awaits a white dwarf star that wanders too close to a moderately massive black hole. According to a new study, the black hole's gravitational pull on the white dwarf would cause tidal forces sufficient to disrupt the stellar remnant and reignite nuclear burning in it, giving rise to a supernova explosion with an unusual appearance.
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Linked Hawaiian telescopes catch a nova surprise
First results from a new scientific instrument at W. M. Keck Observatory are helping scientists understand the physics behind recurrent novae, a type of cataclysmic star system. The results are overturning long-standing assumptions about powerful explosions called novae and have produced the first unified model for a nearby nova called RS Ophiuchi.
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Cosmic suburbia is a better breeding ground for stars
New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that galaxies prefer to raise stars in cosmic suburbia rather than in "big cities."
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Hyperfast star proven to be alien -- A young star is speeding away from the Milky Way so fast that astronomers have been puzzled by where it came from; based on its young age it has traveled too far to have come from our galaxy.
On-orbit handover for first Wideband Global SATCOM -- Boeing on Monday announced the successful on-orbit handover of the first of six Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) satellites to the U.S. Air Force. WGS-1 is the U.S. Department of Defense's highest capacity communications satellite, offering a quantum leap in communications bandwidth for airmen, soldiers, sailors and Marines.
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Russian communications satellite fired into orbit
A civil communications satellite built to link senior Russian government leaders and a variety of international customers launched to its 22,300-mile-high perch in space Monday aboard the first Proton rocket mission of 2008.
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Stardust's comet bits look like asteroid materials
Contrary to expectations for a small icy body, much of the comet dust returned by the Stardust mission formed very close to the young sun and was altered from the solar system's early materials.
FULL STORY
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Cosmic fireworks fizzled out at universe's mid-life
We all start to party less around middle age, and new studies by a team led by University of Texas at Austin astronomer Shardha Jogee now finds that the universe, as a whole, is no exception.
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Seismic images show dinosaur-killing meteor made bigger splash -- The most detailed three-dimensional seismic images yet of the Chicxulub crater, a mostly submerged and buried impact crater on the Mexico coast, may modify a theory explaining the extinction of 70 percent of life on Earth 65 million years ago.
Lockheed GPS satellites pass 75 years of on-orbit ops -- The Global Positioning System Block IIR and IIR-M satellite constellation, designed and built by Lockheed Martin to provide significantly improved navigation capabilities for military and civilian users worldwide, has accumulated over 75 years of successful on-orbit operations.
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Jupiter's giant storms caught in Hubble images
A University of Arizona scientist, observing Jupiter with the Hubble Space Telescope last May, took some of the best images of two unusual giant storms that erupted from the planet last spring.
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OTHER HEADLINES Additional stories today
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Asteroid to make rare close flyby of Earth on Tuesday -- Scientists are monitoring the orbit of asteroid 2007 TU24. The asteroid, believed to be between 500 and 2,000 feet in size, is expected to fly past Earth on Jan. 29.
Arecibo to take close images of a near-Earth asteroid -- The Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico will observe a newly discovered asteroid as the object called 2007 TU24 passes within 1.4 lunar distances, or 334,000 miles, from Earth.
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Massive gas cloud speeding to collision with Milky Way
A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is speeding toward a collision with our Milky Way Galaxy, and when it hits -- in less than 40 million years -- it may set off a spectacular burst of stellar fireworks.
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Chandra telescope reveals rapidly whirling black holes
A new study using results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory provides one of the best pieces of evidence yet that many supermassive black holes are spinning extremely rapidly. The whirling of these giant black holes drives powerful jets that pump huge amounts of energy into their environment and affects galaxy growth.
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OTHER HEADLINES Additional stories today
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NASA tsunami research makes waves in science community -- A wave of new NASA research on tsunamis has yielded an innovative method to improve existing tsunami warning systems, and a potentially groundbreaking new theory on the source of the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
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Covert satellite for Israel launched by Indian rocket
An Israeli spy satellite designed to scout enemy military activity in the face of darkness and poor weather was successfully launched aboard an Indian rocket Monday during a mission shrouded in a veil of secrecy.
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Violent lives of galaxies: Caught in dark matter web
Astronomers are using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to dissect one of the largest structures in the universe as part of a quest to understand the violent lives of galaxies. Hubble is providing indirect evidence of unseen dark matter tugging on galaxies in the crowded, rough-and-tumble environment of a massive supercluster of hundreds of galaxies.
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Circumstellar dust takes flight in 'The Moth'
What superficially resembles a giant moth floating in space is giving astronomers new insight into the formation and evolution of planetary systems.
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Moon Stuck
Some of the most influential leaders of the space community are quietly working to offer the next U.S. president an alternative to President Bush's "vision for space exploration" -- one that would delete a lunar base and move instead toward manned missions to asteroids along with a renewed emphasis on Earth environmental spacecraft.
FULL STORY
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Probe's encounter reveals unseen side of Mercury
Two days after NASA's Messenger probe sped past Mercury, a group of Earth-bound scientists are getting their first glimpse of previously undiscovered parts of the scorched planet.
FULL STORY
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Ice clouds give Mars shade
Until now, Mars has generally been regarded as a desert world, where a visiting astronaut would be surprised to see clouds scudding across the orange sky. However, new results show that the arid planet possesses high-level clouds that are sufficiently dense to cast a shadow on the surface.
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OTHER HEADLINES Additional stories today
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JPL nanotubes help advance brain tumor research -- The potential of carbon nanotubes to diagnose and treat brain tumors is being explored through a partnership between NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and City of Hope, a leading cancer research and treatment center.
2007 was tied as Earth's second warmest year -- Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City have found that 2007 tied with 1998 for Earth's second warmest year in a century. Researchers used temperature data from weather stations on land, satellite measurements of sea ice temperature since 1982 and data from ships for earlier years.
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Even thin galaxies can grow fat black holes
Like people, galaxies come in different shapes and sizes. There are thin spirals both with and without central bulges of stars, and more rotund ellipticals that are themselves like giant bulges. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected plump black holes where least expected -- skinny galaxies.
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Sea Launch successfully returns to flight
One year after a Sea Launch Zenit rocket was engulfed in a dramatic launch pad explosion in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Ukrainian booster successfully returned to the skies Wednesday to haul an Arab mobile communications satellite into space.
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YESTERDAY'S STORY
EARLIER STORY
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Ulysses spacecraft flies over sun's north pole
The Ulysses spacecraft was making a rare flyby of the sun's north pole on Monday. Unlike any other spacecraft, Ulysses is able to sample winds at the sun's poles, which are difficult to study from Earth.
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OTHER HEADLINES Additional stories today
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Quest to find water on the moon moves closer to launch -- Cameras and sensors that will look for the presence of water on the moon have completed validation tests and been shipped to the manufacturer of NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, which is known as LCROSS.
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Messenger probe has close encounter with Mercury
NASA's innovative Messenger spacecraft on Monday made a high-speed, low-altitude flyby of Mercury to give eager scientists their first close-up glimpse of the half-frozen, half-baked planet in more than three decades. The flyby is the first of three close encounters planned over the next two years that will use Mercury's gravity to slow the craft enough to slip into orbit around the innermost planet in 2011.
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Station juggles EVA, supply ship and shuttle plans
Russian space managers have agreed to move up the launch of an unmanned Progress supply ship by two days to Feb. 5, clearing the way for NASA to retarget launch of the shuttle Atlantis on a twice-delayed space station assembly mission for Feb. 7. NASA managers made the decision Thursday and officially announced it Friday, after consultation with the agency's international partners.
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MISSION ARCHIVE
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Weird object may be result of colliding protoplanets
Something bizarre orbiting a young, failed star 170 light-years from Earth may be the progeny of two protoplanets that collided and merged, astronomers say.
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NASA scientists predict black hole light echo show
It's well known that black holes can slow time to a crawl and tidally stretch large objects into spaghetti-like strands. But according to new theoretical research from two NASA astrophysicists, the wrenching gravity just outside the outer boundary of a black hole can produce yet another bizarre effect: light echoes.
FULL STORY
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Hubble telescope discovers a double 'Einstein ring'
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung directly behind a foreground massive galaxy, like three beads on a string.
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'Blue blobs' in space are orphaned clusters of stars
Finding blue blobs in space sounds like an encounter with an alien out of a science fiction movie. But the Hubble Space Telescope's powerful vision has resolved strange objects nicknamed "blobs" and found them to be brilliant blue clusters of stars born in the swirls and eddies of a galactic smashup 200 million years ago.
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New X-ray source in nearby galaxy spawns mystery
Astronomers studying a nearby galaxy have spied a rare type of star system -- one that contains a black hole that suddenly began glowing brightly with X-rays. The discovery suggests that astronomers have more to learn about the lives and deaths of massive stars in galaxies such as our own.
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OTHER HEADLINES Additional stories today
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Galaxy may hold hundreds of rogue black holes -- If the latest simulation of what happens when black holes merge is correct, there could be hundreds of rogue black holes, each weighing several thousand times the mass of the sun, roaming around the Milky Way galaxy.
Astronomers find record-old cosmic explosion -- Using the powerful one-two combo of NASA's Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst, took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang.
Galaxy's antimatter cloud discovered to be lopsided -- The shape of the mysterious cloud of antimatter in the central regions of the Milky Way has been revealed by ESA's orbiting gamma-ray observatory Integral. The unexpectedly lopsided shape is a new clue to the origin of the antimatter.
Scientists detect lowest frequency radar echo from the moon -- A team of scientists has detected the lowest frequency radar echo from the moon ever seen with earth-based receivers. Analysis of the echo gives information on the properties of the lunar sub-surface topography.
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Upgraded connector ready for shuttle fuel tank
An upgraded wiring connector will be ready for installation on the shuttle Atlantis' external tank this week in a bid to eliminate the vexing open circuits that grounded the orbiter twice in December.
FULL STORY
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Sunspot is harbinger of
the new solar cycle
A new 11-year cycle of heightened solar activity, bringing with it increased risks for power grids, critical military, civilian and airline communications, GPS signals and even cell phones and ATM transactions, showed signs it was on its way last week when the cycle's first sunspot appeared in the sun's Northern Hemisphere, NOAA scientists said.
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OTHER HEADLINES Additional stories today
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In search for water on Mars, clues from Antarctic -- Scientists have gathered more evidence that suggests flowing water on Mars -- by comparing images of the red planet to an otherworldly landscape on Earth.
Scientific balloons achieve Antarctic flight record -- NASA and the National Science Foundation have achieved a new milestone in conducting scientific observations from balloons, by launching and operating three long-duration flights within a single Antarctic summer.
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Red dust in disk may harbor precursors to life
Astronomers at the Carnegie Institution have found the first indications of highly complex organic molecules in the disk of red dust surrounding a distant star. The eight-million-year-old star is inferred to be in the late stages of planet formation, suggesting that the basic building blocks of life may be common in planetary systems.
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Hot cyclones churn at both ends of Saturn
Despite more than a decade of winter darkness, Saturn's north pole is home to an unexpected hot spot remarkably similar to one at the planet's sunny south pole. The source of its heat is a mystery. Now, the first detailed views of the gas giant's high latitudes from the Cassini spacecraft reveal a matched set of hot cyclonic vortices, one at each pole.
FULL STORY
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History of solar system read in grains of comet dust
Four years ago, NASA's Stardust spacecraft chased down a comet and collected grains of dust blowing off its nucleus. When the spacecraft Comet Wild-2 returned, comet dust was shipped to scientists all over the world.
FULL STORY
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White dwarf surprises and pulses like a pulsar
New observations from Suzaku, a joint Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and NASA X-ray observatory, have challenged scientists' conventional understanding of white dwarfs. Observers had believed white dwarfs were inert stellar corpses that slowly cool and fade away, but the new data tell a completely different story.
FULL STORY
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NASA pencils in Jan. 24 as earliest Atlantis launch date
NASA managers Thursday agreed to press ahead with work to replace suspect engine cutoff - ECO - sensor connectors on the shuttle Atlantis' external tank on the assumption parallel laboratory testing will confirm the root cause of open circuits that derailed two December launch tries.
FULL STORY
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Sea Launch takes another shot at returning to flight
Sea Launch's ocean-going launch pad and command ship are again sailing across the Pacific Ocean after a series of November attempts were thwarted by unusually strong ocean currents that could be linked to a La Nina climate pattern.
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Read our earlier news archive page.
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