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Complex 36 demolition
The two mobile service towers at Cape Canaveral's Complex 36 that had supported Atlas rockets for decades are toppled to the ground with 122 pounds of explosives.
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Atlas 5's NRO launch
The United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket lifts off June 15 from Cape Canaveral's Complex 41 on the classified NROL-30 mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.
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Booster cameras
Hitch a ride up and down on the twin solid rocket boosters that launched shuttle Atlantis last week. Each booster was outfitted with three cameras to give NASA upclose footage of the vehicle's ascent.
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Atlantis launch coverage
Shuttle Atlantis blasted off June 8 on its mission to the space station.
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Phoenix: At the Cape
NASA's Mars lander named Phoenix has arrive at Kennedy Space Center to begin preparations for launch in August.
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STS-63: A rendezvous with space station Mir
As a prelude to future dockings between American space shuttles and the Russian space station Mir, the two countries had a test rendezvous in Feb. 1995.
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"Apollo 17: On The Shoulders of Giants"
Apollo's final lunar voyage is relived in this movie. The film depicts the highlights of Apollo 17's journey to Taurus-Littrow and looks to the future Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz and shuttle programs.
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"Apollo 10: To Sort Out The Unknowns"
The May 1969 mission of Apollo 10 served as a final dress rehearsal before the first lunar landing later that summer. Stafford, Young and Cernan went to the moon to uncover lingering spacecraft problems that needed to be solved.
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NASA's Swift sees double supernova in galaxy
NASA-GSFC NEWS RELEASE
Posted: June 26, 2007
In just the past six weeks, two supernovae have flared up in an obscure galaxy in the constellation Hercules. Never before have astronomers observed two of these powerful stellar explosions occurring in the same galaxy so close together in time.
Supernova 2007ck (left) is a Type II event, and Supernova 2007co (right) is a Type Ia event. The image is a combination of red, green, and blue pictures taken on June 9 and 12 by the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope on NASA's Swift satellite, which was designed primarily to study another type of stellar explosion - gamma ray bursts. Credit: Stefan Immler NASA/GSFC, Swift Science Team.
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The galaxy, known as MCG +05-43-16, is 380 million light-years from Earth. Until this year, astronomers had never sighted a supernova popping off in this stellar congregation. A supernova is an extremely energetic and life-ending explosion of a star.
Making the event even more unusual is the fact that the two supernovae belong to different types. Supernova 2007ck is a Type II event - which is triggered when the core of a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel and collapses gravitationally, producing a shock wave that blows the star to smithereens. Supernova 2007ck was first observed on May 19.
In contrast, Supernova 2007co is a Type Ia event, which occurs when a white dwarf star accretes so much material from a binary companion star that it blows up like a giant thermonuclear bomb. It was discovered on June 4, 2007. A white dwarf is the exposed core of a star after it has ejected its atmosphere; it's approximately the size of Earth but with the mass of our Sun.
"Most galaxies have a supernova every 25 to 100 years, so it's remarkable to have a galaxy with two supernovae discovered just 16 days apart," says Stefan Immler of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2006 Immler used NASA's Swift satellite to image two supernovae in the elliptical galaxy NGC 1316, but both of those explosions were Type Ia events, and they were discovered six months apart.
The simultaneous appearance of two supernovae in one galaxy is an extremely rare occurrence, but it's merely a coincidence and does not imply anything unusual about MCG +05-43-16. Because the two supernovae are tens of thousands of light-years from each other, and because light travels at a finite speed, astronomers in the galaxy itself, or in a different galaxy, might record the two supernovae exploding thousands of years apart.
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