Space Exploration and Astronomy News

Welcome to the Night Sky Observer (NSO) space and astronomy news website. Most pages (especially news, podcasts and vodcasts) are updated several times a day.

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Gary Nugent

ESA today inaugurated a new hub that will strengthen Europe’s contribution to the global hunt for asteroids and other hazardous natural objects that may strike Earth.

Near-Earth Objects, or NEOs, are asteroids or comets with sizes ranging from metres to tens of kilometres that orbit the Sun and whose orbits …

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The pale rock in the upper center of this image, about the size of a human forearm, includes a target called “Esperance,” which was inspected by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. Data from the rover’s alpha particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS) indicate that Esperance’s composition is higher in aluminum and silica, …

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On May 31, 2013, asteroid 1998 QE2 will sail serenely past Earth, getting no closer than about 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers), or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon. And while QE2 is not of much interest to those astronomers and scientists on the …

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During a 24 hour period straddling May 13th and 14th, the sun unleashed three X-class solar flares. These are the strongest flares of the year so far, and they signal a significant increase in solar activity. The source of the flares, a large sunspot on the sun’s eastern limb, …

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These polar maps show the first global, topographic mapping of Saturn’s moon Titan, using data from NASA’s Cassini mission. To create these maps, scientists employed a mathematical process called splining, which uses smooth curved surfaces to “join” the areas between grids of existing topography profiles obtained by Cassini’s radar instrument.Image …

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Bright arcs are smeared around the heart of galaxy cluster Abell S1077 in this image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble space telescope. The arcs are stretched images of distant galaxies distorted by the cluster’s enormous gravitational field.

Galaxy clusters are large groupings of galaxies, each hosting millions of stars. …

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found the building blocks for Earth-sized planets in an unlikely place– the atmospheres of a pair of burned-out stars called white dwarfs.

These dead stars are located 150 light-years from Earth in a relatively young star cluster, Hyades, in the constellation Taurus. The star cluster …

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In February, a speeding asteroid slammed into our atmosphere and exploded high over Russia’s Ural region, injuring hundreds and causing millions of euros of damage. What should we do if we have a similar – or even bigger – strike in the future?

Of the more than 600,000 known asteroids …

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The Herschel observatory, a European space telescope for which NASA helped build instruments and process data, has stopped making observations after running out of liquid coolant as expected.

The European Space Agency mission, launched almost four years ago, revealed the universe‘s “coolest” secrets by observing the frigid side of …

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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first close-up, visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling around Saturn’s north pole.

In high-resolution pictures and video, scientists see the hurricane’s eye is about 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide, 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Thin, bright clouds …

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