In an interesting twist to the story of NASA’s ace planet-hunting telescope Kepler, mission managers have announced their intention to bring the mission back online despite suffering a crippling blow in May.
The proposed extended mission, called simply “K2,” could see the orbiting space telescope scan huge swathes of sky, focusing on smaller stars that possess planets with very compact … Read the rest of this article
NASA’s Great Observatories are teaming up to look deeper into the universe than ever before. With a boost from natural “zoom lenses” found in space, they should be able to uncover galaxies that are as much as 100 times fainter than what the Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra space telescopes can typically see.
This ambitious collaborative program is called The Frontier … Read the rest of this article
ESA’s Planck space telescope has been turned off after nearly 4.5 years soaking up the relic radiation from the Big Bang and studying the evolution of stars and galaxies throughout the Universe’s history.
Project scientist Jan Tauber sent the final command to the Planck satellite at 12:10:27 UT on October 23, 2013, marking the end of operations for ESA’s ‘time … Read the rest of this article
Using a telescope in Antarctica and ESA’s Herschel space observatory, astronomers have made the first detection of a subtle twist in the relic radiation from the Big Bang, paving the way towards revealing the first moments of the Universe’s existence.
The elusive signal was found in the way the first light in the Universe has been deflected during its journey … Read the rest of this article
Astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have created the first cloud map of a planet beyond our solar system, a sizzling, Jupiter-like world known as Kepler-7b.
The planet is marked by high clouds in the west and clear skies in the east. Previous studies from Spitzer have resulted in temperature maps of planets orbiting other stars, … Read the rest of this article
NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, is giving the wider astronomical community a first look at its unique X-ray images of the cosmos. The first batch of data from the black-hole hunting telescope is publicly available today, Aug. 29, via NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center, or HEASARC.
“We are pleased to present the world with NuSTAR’s … Read the rest of this article
Ten years after a Delta II rocket launched NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, lighting up the night sky over Cape Canaveral, Fla., the fourth of the agency’s four Great Observatories continues to illuminate the dark side of the cosmos with its infrared eyes.
The telescope studied comets and asteroids, counted stars, scrutinized planets and galaxies, and discovered soccer-ball-shaped carbon spheres in … Read the rest of this article
On Wednesday (July 24), some cautiously optimistic news from the team attempting to recover NASA’s stricken Kepler space telescope was announced.
The recovery effort, which began last week, has gotten as far as checking out both of the telescope’s failed reaction control wheels, part the observatory’s critical pointing system.
Kepler has four reaction wheels and needs at least two … Read the rest of this article
The tiny dot against the streaking star field in the image below is one of the last views that ground-based observers will see of ESA’s iconic Herschel space observatory.
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The Herschel space observatory is shown here in monochrome and negative against a backdrop of stars, the latter streaked by the telescope tracking the motion of the observatory as it drifts …
Planetary Resourecs are in the final hours of their crowdfunding campaign. They have a lot in store for you during their LIVE FINALE EVENT, beginning at 3:00 p.m. PDT today (Sunday) (convert to your time) through the close of their Kickstarter campaign at 7:00 p.m. PDT. But before all of that fun starts, they wanted to share … Read the rest of this article
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