Astronomy and Space News – June, 2011

June 24: NASA’s next Mars rover has completed the journey from its California birthplace to Florida in preparation for launch this fall. The Mars Science Laboratory rover, also known as Curiosity, arrived late Wednesday night at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center aboard an Air Force C-17 transport plane.

June 24: NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has discovered the best evidence yet for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft’s direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon.

June 24: Newly-discovered asteroid 2011 MD will pass only 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) above Earth’s surface on Monday, June 27th at about 9:30AM EDT.

June 22: In Sept. 1859, on the eve of a below-average solar cycle, the sun unleashed one of the most powerful storms in centuries. The underlying flare was so unusual, researchers still aren’t sure how to categorize it. The blast peppered Earth with the most energetic protons in half-a-millennium, induced electrical currents that set telegraph offices on fire, and sparked Northern Lights over Cuba and Hawaii. This week, officials have gathered at the National Press Club in Washington DC to ask themselves a simple question: What if it happens again?

June 24: NASA has declared full mission success for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). LRO changed our view of the entire moon and brought it into sharper focus with unprecedented detail.

June 21: The first map of sea-ice thickness from ESA’s CryoSat mission was revealed today at the Paris Air and Space Show. This new information is set to change our understanding of the complex relationship between ice and climate.

June 21: The first day of northern summer began with a solar flare. The incoming CME does not appear to be particularly potent butthe cloud could trigger polar geomagnetic storms when it reaches Earth on or about June 23rd.

June 17: Over 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, ESA’s Herschel space telescope has been observing the Universe for the last two years, studying the infrared radiation emitted by the coldest bodies in the cosmos. See the invisible in this video.

June 17: Earlier this month, ESA’s Mars Express performed a special manoeuvre to observe an unusual alignment of Jupiter and the martian moon Phobos. The impressive images have now been processed into a movie of this rare event.

June 15:The June 15 total lunar eclipse will be visible to observers in Africa, southern Asia, and Australia. It is thought that this eclipse will be one of the darkest eclipses in recent times and one of the longest at 100 mnutes. It will be second only to the July 16, 2000 total lunar eclipse.

June 14:On 8 June, mission controllers had the first opportunity to switch ESA’s Rosetta comet-hunter into deep-space hibernation for 31 months. During this loneliest leg of its decade-long mission, Rosetta will loop ever closer toward comet 67-P, soaring to almost 1000 million km from Earth.

June 10: ESA and NASA have announced the scientific investigations selected for their 2016 ExoMars lander demonstrator. They will probe the atmosphere during the descent, and return the first ever data on electrical fields at the surface of Mars.

June 10: NASA’s Voyager probes are truly going where no one has gone before. Gliding silently toward the stars, 9 billion miles from Earth, they are beaming back news from the most distant, unexplored reaches of the solar system. The Voyager probes appear to have entered a strange realm of frothy magnetic bubbles.

June 8: Yesterday morning (June 7th) around 06:41 UT, magnetic fields above sunspot complex 1226-1227 became unstable and erupted. The blast produced an M2-class solar flare, an S1-class radiation storm, and a massive CME. A recording of the blast from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory ranks as one of the most beautiful and dramatic movies of the SDO era.

June 7: ESA’s Mars Express celebrates eight years in space with a new view of ice in the southern polar region of Mars. The poles are closely linked to the planet’s climate and constantly change with the seasons. Their study is an important scientific objective of the mission.

June 5: The 2011 noctilucent cloud (NLC) season has begun. For the past few nights, observers in northern parts of Europe have spotted velvety, electric-blue tendrils rippling across the sunset sky.

June 3: A team of NASA-funded researchers has measured for the first time water from the Moon in the form of tiny globules of molten rock, which have turned to glass-like material trapped within crystals. Data from these newly discovered lunar melt inclusions indicate the water content of lunar magma is 100 times higher than previous studies suggested.

June 3: The six men in the Mars500 facility near Moscow have been in isolation now 365 days. The European crew members have been writing in their latest letters home about the highlights, monotonous life, team spirit and determination to go on.

June 2: Space shuttle Endeavour and its six-astronaut crew sailed home for the final time, ending a 16-day journey of more than 6.5 million miles with a landing at 2:35 a.m. EDT on Wednesday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

June 1: The Sky This Month page has been updated with this months videos, Moon and Jupiter information and news about this month’s Total Lunar Eclipse.