Space Elevators in Our Future?

Blasting a space shuttle away from Earth's gravity and through atmospheric friction at 15,000 miles an hour (24,140 kilometers an hour) is the most dangerous and costly part of every mission.
Why not just take an elevator instead? Thanks to a new development in the manufacture of molecule-size cylinders known as carbon nanotubes, that may one day be a viable option.
In theory, space elevators need a fixed line, or cord, that stretches from an anchor on Earth to a station out in space. The station acts like a counterweight, forever "held" above the planet by the centrifugal force from Earth's rotation.
A tram-like vehicle equipped with electric motors could climb this tether from Earth's surface into space at a safer speed than rocket alternatives..........

National Geographic News

The Star Bar

MILWAUKEE - (KRT) - Slowly, scientists are putting together the emerging bits of knowledge about the spiraling galaxy we call home, the Milky Way.

It is made up of as many as 100 billion stars. It's 100,000 light years across. It has rotated about 50 times during its lifetime. There most certainly is a super massive black hole at its center.

And now two Wisconsin scientists say they have revealing evidence on a long-suspected major feature of the Milky Way.

Writing in Astrophysical Journal Letters, their comprehensive structural analysis offers a wealth of new details on the long central bar of stars that runs across the center of the galaxy.

The bar, which has been suspected since the 1980s and was identified in a 2002 paper by other scientists, turns out to be longer than initially believed, according the work of Robert Benjamin, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Ed Churchwell, a professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The bar is composed of older, so-called red stars, possibly millions of them...........

The Wichita Eagle

New Planet Discovered

A planet larger than Pluto has been discovered in the outlying regions of the solar system..........

Science Daily

Local Man Has Own Launch Pad to Stars

PLEASANTON — When a team of planet hunters announced the discovery of a new extrasolar planet on June 30, it was already old news to amateur astronomer Ron Bissinger.
The day before the announcement, Bissinger, tipped off by a member of the research team, had detected evidence of planet HD 149026b from an elaborate miniature observatory he built in his back yard..........

Tri-Valley Herald

Dust-enshrouded Star Like the Sun

Astronomers report tremendous quantities of warm dusty debris surrounding a star with luminosity and mass similar to the sun's, but located 300 light-years from Earth. The extraordinary nature of the dust indicates a violent history of cosmic collisions between asteroids and comets, or perhaps even between planets. The discovery is published July 21 in Nature..........

ScienceDaily

A New Planet in a Three Star System

A newfound planet has three suns, a scientist says—a discovery that highlights the unimagined beauties the cosmos still has in store for us, suggests planets are even more common than previously believed, and could rewrite theories of planet formation..........

World Science

A New Planet With Massive Core

Astronomers have discovered an extrasolar planet with the largest core of any known planet. The discovery is especially exciting to planet formation theorists, because it provides extremely strong observational evidence in support of the "core accretion" theory, one of two main theories for how giant planets form..........

Read More Tim Stephens and Denize Springer, UC Santa Cruz Currents, July 11, 2005

Minerals on Mars

From space and even on the surface, Mars just looks dry, reddish and rocky as far as the camera can see. But there's actually a pretty complex world of minerals under that surface layer of basalt. By studying the surface of Mars with Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey, NASA scientists have turned up very interesting surface features which hint at the hidden minerals underneath. This research is published in the latest edition of the Journal Nature. Read More

Universe Today July 7, 2005

Comet Impact Succeeds

IMPACT! Scientists blast projectile into comet

July 4, 2005
Special to World Science

Scientists shot a washing machine-sized projectile into a comet, eight times faster than a rifle bullet. The impact created an enormous blast visible on images sent back to Earth, and whose size surprised even some mission scientists.

This image from NASA TV is a view from Deep Impact's flyby showing the impactor colliding with comet Tempel 1. (NASA)

NASA researchers confirmed the impact at 1:58 a.m. Eastern U.S. time, in a project designed to better understand what comets are made of.

A sequence of images sent back by cameras on the projectile revealed growing amounts of detail on the rocky-looking comet as a huge crater came to view. Later, images showed a bright blast showering off the speeding, potato-shaped object.

Now, the task of analyzing the images and other data from the mission begins..........Read More

Top 25 Unanswered Science Questions

The journal, Science, has posted it's top 25 unanswered science questions. Just reading the questions is an education in itself.

Deep Impact Spacecraft Detects Comet Outbursts

NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft observed a massive, short-lived outburst of ice or other particles from comet Tempel 1 that temporarily expanded the size and reflectivity of the cloud of dust and gas (coma) that surrounds the comet nucleus.

The outburst was detected as a dramatic brightening of the comet on June 22. It is the second of two such events observed in the past two weeks. A smaller outburst also was seen on June 14 by Deep Impact, the Hubble Space Telescope and by ground based observers..........Read More

ScienceDaily June 29, 2005

Solar Sails Set to Debut

The Planetary Society, a U.S. nonprofit group devoted to space exploration, plans to launch the world's first solar sail spacecraft tomorrow.
Cosmos 1 will be launched from a submerged Russian submarine in the Barents Sea and carried into orbit by a converted intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
Initially orbiting the Earth at an altitude of about 500 miles (800 kilometers), the spacecraft will gradually move outward by solar sailing—propelled by the pressure of light particles from the sun striking the craft's eight triangular sails.
The journey has no destination. The mission's goal is simply to prove that solar sail technology works.
Space sails carry no fuel and can continue accelerating over almost unlimited distances. This prompts scientists to envision a time when the technology may be used for future travel between planets in our solar system. Someday solar sails might be used to send astronauts to new worlds around other stars..........

National Geographic News, June 20, 2005 Read More

A New Planet Outside Our Solar System

A planet that may be Earth-like -- but too hot for life as we know it -- has been discovered orbiting a nearby star. The discovery of the planet, with an estimated radius about twice that of Earth, was announced yesterday at the National Science Foundation. "This is the smallest extrasolar planet yet detected and the first of a new class of rocky terrestrial planets," Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution in Washington said in a statement. "It's like Earth's bigger cousin." Read More

TechNewsWorld June 14, 2005

Volcano on Titan

A recent flyby of Saturn's hazy moon Titan by the Cassini spacecraft has revealed evidence of a possible volcano, which could be a source of methane in Titan's atmosphere.

Images taken in infrared light show a circular feature roughly 30 kilometers (19 miles) in diameter that does not resemble any features seen on Saturn's other icy moons. Scientists interpret the feature as an "ice volcano," a dome formed by upwelling icy plumes that release methane into Titan's atmosphere..........

ScienceDaily, June 11, 2005 Read More

Image of Dust Disk and Black Hole

Resembling a gigantic hubcap in space, a 3,700-light-year-wide dust disk encircles a 300-million- solar-mass black hole in the center of the elliptical galaxy NGC 7052.

The disk, possibly a remnant of an ancient galaxy collision, will be swallowed up by the black hole in several billion years. The black-and-white image on the left, taken by a ground-based telescope, shows the complete galaxy. The Hubble picture on the right is a close-up view of the dust disk surrounding the black hole..........

See the website for the amazing photo image and other images produced by the Hubble Space Telescope.

A New Mission to Mars

NASA has given the green light to a project to put a long-armed lander on to the icy ground of the far-northern Martian plains. NASA's Phoenix lander is designed to examine the site for potential habitats for water ice, and to look for possible indicators of life, past or present..........

NASA News, June 2, 2005

A Deep Impact Encounter on the Horizon

On July 4, NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft will attempt an extraordinarily daring encounter with the far-flung comet Tempel 1, which is hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. As if that is not challenging enough, the comet's size, shape and other characteristics are not entirely known..........

ScienceDaily, June 2, 2005

Space Telescope Reveals Striking Scene

The saga of how a few monstrous stars spawned a diverse community of additional stars is told in a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The striking picture reveals an eclectic mix of embryonic stars living in the tattered neighborhood of one of the most famous massive stars in our Milky Way galaxy, Eta Carinae. Astronomers say that radiation and winds from Eta Carinae and its massive siblings ripped apart the surrounding cloud of gas and dust, shocking the new stars into being..........

ScienceDaily, June 1, 2005 Read More

Mysterious Spot on Titan

Saturn's moon Titan shows an unusual bright spot that has scientists mystified. The spot, approximately the size and shape of West Virginia, is just southeast of the bright region called Xanadu and is visible to multiple instruments on the Cassini spacecraft. The 483-kilometer-wide (300-mile) region may be a "hot" spot -- an area possibly warmed by a recent asteroid impact or by a mixture of water ice and ammonia from a warm interior, oozing out of an ice volcano onto colder surrounding terrain. Other possibilities for the unusual bright spot include landscape features holding clouds in place or unusual materials on the surface..........

ScienceDaily, May 25, 2005 Read More

Another New Planet

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- An international collaboration featuring Ohio State University astronomers has detected a planet in a solar system that, at roughly 15,000 light years from Earth, is one of the most distant ever discovered. In a time when technology is starting to make such finds almost commonplace, this new planet -- which is roughly three times the size of Jupiter -- is special for several reasons, said Andrew Gould, professor of astronomy at Ohio State . The technique that astronomers used to find the planet worked so well that he thinks it could be used to find much smaller planets -- Earth-sized planets, even very distant ones.
And because two amateur astronomers in New Zealand helped detect the planet using only their backyard telescopes, the find suggests that anyone can become a planet hunter..........

ScienceDaily, May 26, 2005 Read More