Thursday 15 September 2016

Cassini begins epic final year at Saturn

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After more than 12 years studying Saturn, its rings and moons, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has entered the final year of its epic voyage. The conclusion of the historic scientific odyssey is planned for September 2017, but not before the spacecraft completes a daring two-part endgame.
via Science Daily
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Echoes of black holes eating stars discovered

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A black hole destroying a star, an event astronomers call 'stellar tidal disruption,' releases an enormous amount of energy, brightening the surroundings in an event called a flare. Two new studies characterize tidal disruption flares by studying how surrounding dust absorbs and re-emits their light, like echoes. This approach allowed scientists to measure the energy of flares from stellar tidal disruption events more precisely than ever before.
via Science Daily
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Some ancient Mars lakes formed long after others

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Lakes and snowmelt-fed streams on Mars formed much later than previously thought possible, according to new findings. The recently discovered lakes and streams appeared roughly a billion years after an earlier era of wet conditions on ancient Mars. These results suggest the surface conditions at this later time may also have been suitable for microbial life on the Red Planet.
via Science Daily
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Exploration team shoots for the moon with water-propelled satellite

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Cislunar Explorers, a team of Cornell University students guided by Mason Peck, a former senior official at NASA and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is attempting to boldly go where no CubeSat team has gone before: around the moon. Not only is Peck's group attempting to make a first-ever moon orbit with a satellite no bigger than a cereal box, made entirely with off-the-shelf materials, it's doing so with propellant that you can obtain simply by turning on a faucet.
via Science Daily
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Starving black hole returns brilliant galaxy to the shadows

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Many galaxies are found to have an extremely bright core powered by a supermassive black hole. These cores make "active galaxies" some of the brightest objects in the Universe. They are thought to shine so brightly because hot material is glowing fiercely as it falls into the black hole, a process known as accretion. This brilliant light can vary hugely between different active galaxies, so astronomers classify them into several types based on the properties of the light they emit.
via Science Daily
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Fighting cancer with space research

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For the past 15 years, the big data techniques pioneered by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have been revolutionizing biomedical research. On Sept. 6, 2016, JPL and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, renewed a research partnership through 2021, extending the development of data science that originated in space exploration and is now supporting new cancer discoveries.
via Science Daily
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Hubble Takes Close-up Look at Disintegrating Comet


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Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami survived for 4.5 billion years in the frigid Kuiper Belt, a vast reservoir of icy bodies on the outskirts of our solar system. The objects are the leftovers from our solar system's construction. But within the last few million years, the unlucky comet was gravitationally kicked to the inner solar system by the outer planets. The comet, dubbed 332P, found a new home, settling into an orbit just beyond Mars. But the new home, closer to the sun, has doomed the comet. Sunlight is heating up Comet 332P's surface, causing jets of gas and dust to erupt. The jets act like rocket engines, spinning up the comet's rotation. The faster spin rate loosened chunks of material, which are drifting off the surface and into space.


via HubbleSite NewsCenter -- Latest News Releases
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2016/35/

Retrograde Mars and Saturn

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Wandering Mars and Saturn have spent much of this year remarkably close in planet Earth's night sky. In a sequence of exposures spanning mid-December 2015 through the beginning of this week, this composited skyview follows their time together, including both near opposition, just north of bright star Antares near the Milky Way's central bulge. In the corresponding video, Saturn's apparent movement is seen to be back and forth along the flattened, compact loop, while Mars traces the wider, reversing S-shaped track from upper right to lower left through the frame. To connect the dots and dates just slide your cursor over the picture (or follow this link). It looks that way, but Mars and Saturn don't actually reverse direction along their orbits. Instead, their apparent backwards or retrograde motion with respect to the background stars is a reflection of the orbital motion of the Earth itself. Retrograde motion can be seen each time Earth overtakes and laps planets orbiting farther from the Sun, the Earth moving more rapidly through its own relatively close-in orbit.
Tomorrow's picture: pixels in space
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Trilobites: A Cosmic Comet Breakup

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When astronomers saw Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami 150 million miles from the sun last January, it was in two dozen pieces.
via New York Times