Astrophysics – Page 14 – Spaceflight Now

NASA resumes JWST vibration testing

January 25, 2017 Stephen Clark

Vibration testing on the James Webb Space Telescope, the multibillion-dollar successor to Hubble, has resumed after engineers traced a problem that cropped up last month to a restraint holding part of the observatory’s giant segmented mirror in place for launch.

Engineers examine unexpected readings from JWST shake test

December 20, 2016 Stephen Clark

NASA says engineers are diagnosing the source of “anomalous readings” during a recent vibration test of the sensitive optics and sensors at the heart of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

China lofts pulsar navigation demo satellite

November 10, 2016 Stephen Clark

China launched an innovative satellite Wednesday that will look for X-ray signals from pulsars, the fast-spinning super-dense remnants of collapsed stars, to determine its exact location in space.

Potentially-habitable planet discovered around nearest star Proxima Centauri

August 24, 2016 Keith Cooper

A planet with at least 1.3 times the mass of Earth has been discovered orbiting within the habitable zone of the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, which is just 4.2 light years away.

Japan’s Hitomi observatory made cosmic discovery before failing

July 7, 2016 Stephen Clark

Japan’s doomed Hitomi observatory peeled back a veil on the inner workings of the Perseus cluster of galaxies before the satellite spun out of control earlier this year, revealing in unprecedented detail how gas heated to millions of degrees behaves around an unseen supermassive black hole, scientists said Wednesday.

LISA Pathfinder success bolsters plan for gravitational wave observatory

June 8, 2016 Stephen Clark

Europe’s LISA Pathfinder mission — a fundamental physics lab launched last year to a point a million miles from Earth — has demonstrated the mind-boggling technology required for a future space-based observatory to listen for faint, low-frequency vibrations emitted by invisible objects in the most distant pockets of the universe, scientists said this week.

Kepler adds 1,284 exoplanets to its total

May 10, 2016 William Harwood

A statistical analysis of data collected by NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope during its initial mission shows a better than 99 percent chance that 1,284 worlds previously classified as “candidates” are, in fact, actual planets, researchers said Tuesday.

Japan gives up on rescuing black hole observatory

April 29, 2016 Stephen Clark

Japan’s space agency says it has ceased efforts to rescue a failed X-ray astronomy satellite after it spun out of control and broke apart in orbit, declaring the nearly $400 million mission lost two months after its launch.

Attitude control failures led to break-up of Japanese astronomy satellite

April 18, 2016 Stephen Clark

Japan’s Hitomi X-ray observatory, beset by an attitude control problem that has disrupted communications since March 29, may have shed one of its power-generating solar panels or deployable telescope in orbit and is spinning too fast to contact ground controllers, officials said.

Kepler telescope recovered from spacecraft emergency

April 11, 2016 Stephen Clark

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is stable and out of emergency mode, officials said Monday, and the observatory is downlinking data to help engineers determine what caused it to suspend science operations last week.