Observations using the Very Large Array (orange) reveal the needle-like trail of pulsar J0002+6216 outside the shell of its supernova remnant, shown in image from the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey. The pulsar escaped the remnant some 5,000 years after the supernova explosion.
On March 31, 2005, just minutes after the Cassini spacecraft’s closest approach to Titan during the Titan (T-4) Flyby, Cassini viewed Saturn peeking through Titan’s thick atmosphere.
Saturn’s rings are seen here casting dark, dramatic shadows across the planet’s northern disk (upper left).
This composite is made of images that were taken by the Cassini spacecraft’s camera system, the Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) on March 31, 2005 and received on Earth April 1, 2005. Cassini was approximately 1,200,000 km away from Saturn and 7,000 km away from Titan. The images were taken using red, green, and blue filters.
India says space debris from anti-satellite test to ‘vanish’ in 45 days
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India expects space debris from its anti-satellite weapons launch to burn out in less than 45 days, its top defense scientist said on Thursday, seeking to allay global concern about fragments hitting objects.
The comments came a day after India said it used an indigenously developed ballistic missile interceptor to destroy one of its own satellites at a height of 300 km (186 miles), in a test aimed at boosting its defenses in space.
Critics say such technology, known to be possessed only by the United States, Russia and China, raises the prospect of an arms race in outer space, besides posing a hazard by creating a cloud of fragments that could persist for years.
G. Satheesh Reddy, the chief of India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation, said a low-altitude military satellite was picked for the test, to reduce the risk of debris left in space.
Asteroid’s bumpiness threatens US plan to return a sample to Earth
The first US attempt to bring asteroid dust back to Earth has hit a surprise hurdle. The near-Earth asteroid Bennu is rockier and expelling more debris than expected, according to results from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft1, which is currently orbiting Bennu. The findings could threaten NASA’s plan to scoop up a sample from the asteroid’s surface next year.
The US$800-million mission is not the only one in the process of scoping out an asteroid. Japan’s Hayabusa probe returned the first asteroid sample in 2010, and its successor Hayabusa2 is currently trying to gather its second from the asteroid Ryugu. Both missions aim to explore what asteroids can reveal about the birth and evolution of the Solar System, such as whether they are a source of Earth’s water.
On March 3, 1972, NASA launched the Pioneer 10 probe on a mission to explore distant Jupiter. It would later become the first man-made object to reach escape velocity from the Solar System.
spacex crew dragon capsule docking with the international space station during the unmanned demo mission 1, 2019-03-03
2014 MU69
Neptune’s newly discovered moon may be the survivor of an ancient collision
A newly discovered small moon of Neptune is coming into clearer focus as astronomers have now pinpointed this tiny rock’s orbit and where it might have come from. The moon’s existence heightens the possibility that there are even more tiny worlds around Neptune that we just haven’t seen yet.
Astronomers first spotted this moon in 2013 by combing through images of Neptune that were taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The discoverers have now dubbed the world Hippocamp, the name of a horse-like sea monster from Greek mythology. The title fits in nicely with the theme of Neptune’s 13 other moons, all of which are named after Greek gods of bodies of water.
Hippocamp is incredibly tiny for a moon: it’s just 21 miles across, or about the size of a major metropolitan city. Its minuscule size made this rock super difficult to study from Earth. But with the help of further observations from Hubble, astronomers were able to track this little moon over the last few years, detailing their work in a new paper in Nature. That allowed them to distinguish just how big it is as well as the exact path it takes around Neptune. “We’ve done a full analysis so we know precisely how this object moves,” Mark Showalter, a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute and lead author of the Nature paper who discovered Hippocamp, tells The Verge.
[…]
Since then, the goal has been to get a much better understanding of this little rock. Based on its orbit, Showalter and his team now have a pretty good idea of where this moon came from. Hippocamp’s orbit brings the moon very close to a much bigger moon of Neptune called Proteus, which is 130 miles across. And based on their analysis, Showalter believes that Hippocamp is probably a piece of Proteus that was broken off billions of years ago by a passing comet. “Now we see a very real example of what happens when a comet hits a moon,” he says. “In the case of Proteus, it doesn’t quite break it apart but breaks off a piece and there’s the Hippocamp we see today.”
2014 MU69
is real weird
impact on the moon’s surface captured during the lunar eclipse of 2019-01-20 by the Griffith Observatory
Chang'e-4 and Yutu-2 take pictures of each other on the far side of the Moon
Bevy of mysterious fast radio bursts spotted by Canadian telescope
Good reported the first results from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a telescope that was originally designed to explore the early Universe but has turned out to be ideal for detecting FRBs. First spotted in 20071, FRBs are one of the most intriguing mysteries in astrophysics. They appear all over the sky, and astronomers aren’t sure what causes them.
In early testing during July and August, before it began full operations, CHIME spotted 13 FRBs. Prior to this, astronomers had between 50 and 60 examples.
The more FRBs that astronomers find, the greater the chance they can start to pin down their origin. “If we had 1,000 examples, we would be able to say many more things about what FRBs are like,” Good said.
Citizen Scientists Find New World with NASA Telescope
Using data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, citizen scientists have discovered a planet roughly twice the size of Earth located within its star’s habitable zone, the range of orbital distances where liquid water may exist on the planet’s surface. The new world, known as K2-288Bb, could be rocky or could be a gas-rich planet similar to Neptune. Its size is rare among exoplanets - planets beyond our solar system.
“It’s a very exciting discovery due to how it was found, its temperate orbit and because planets of this size seem to be relatively uncommon,” said Adina Feinstein, a University of Chicago graduate student who discussed the discovery on Monday, Jan. 7, at the 233rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. She is also the lead author of a paper describing the new planet accepted for publication by The Astronomical Journal.
Located 226 light-years away in the constellation Taurus, the planet lies in a stellar system known as K2-288, which contains a pair of dim, cool M-type stars separated by about 5.1 billion miles (8.2 billion kilometers) - roughly six times the distance between Saturn and the Sun. The brighter star is about half as massive and large as the Sun, while its companion is about one-third the Sun’s mass and size. The new planet, K2-288Bb, orbits the smaller, dimmer star every 31.3 days.
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