NASA unveiled a new atlas and catalog of the entire infrared sky today showing more than a half billion stars, galaxies and other objects captured by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. It’s the largest, most detailed infrared view of space, ever. This is a mosaic of the images covering the entire sky as [continue reading]
Expanding network of telescopes will give a seamless view of the changing sky. At 1-metre across, the telescopes of Las Cumbres Observatory in Goleta, California, will be small fry. But they will soon be stitched into a global network that will provide researchers with around-the-clock coverage of quickly changing objects such as extrasolar planets, asteroids [continue reading]
The use of stars, planets and stellar constellations for navigation was of fundamental importance for mankind for thousands of years. Now a group of scientists at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany have developed a new technique using a special population of stars to navigate not on Earth, but in voyages across [continue reading]
The Cassini space probe will dive into the narrow gap between Saturn’s atmosphere and its innermost ring for the final leg of its mission in 2016. Cassini will carry out a series of “proximal orbits” between Saturn and its innermost ring Cassini has been orbiting Saturn from a distance – outside the ring system. The [continue reading]
An odd, previously unseen landform could provide a window into the geological history of Mars, according to new research by University of Washington geologists. Images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show exposed rock strata in periodic bedrock ridges on the floor of the West Candor Chasma on [continue reading]
What is the history of the Moon? The Moon was likely created from debris expelled when a Mars-sized object violently impacted the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. Just after gravitationally condensing, as imagined below, the glowing-hot surface of the Moon cooled and cracked. Rocks large and small continued to impact the surface, including a [continue reading]