Past NASA Missions. NASA Current Missions. Future Missions. S Shuttle and Rocket Launch Schedule. Mission Calendar. Missions. Near-Earth Asteroid - Mission Animation.
IBEX. Messenger. New Horizons. AMS. Voyager. Pioneer Venus One & Orbiter. The Chandra X-ray Observatory Center :: Gateway to the Universe of X-ray Astronomy! Kepler Space Observatory | Alien Planets & Extraterrestrial Life. Hunting down alien planets isn't just for professional astronomers anymore. Thousands of citizen scientists have been poring over data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which has so far detected 1,235 potential alien worlds.
To date, the amateurs have flagged 50 candidate planets that the mission's sophisticated software may have missed, Time magazine reports. It's all part of a project called Planethunters.org, which enlists the discerning eyes of the masses to pick up patterns in mountains of data. "It really is the wisdom of the crowd," said lead project scientist Meg Schwamb of Yale, according to Time. Thousands of fresh eyes The $600 million Kepler space telescope, which launched in March 2009, finds alien planets by searching for tiny, telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet transits — or crosses in front of — it from Earth's perspective. Artist's concept of Kepler-10b, which was detected by NASA's Kepler mission.
And that does happen. Happy for the help. The Heliosphere is Tilted - implications for the 'Galactic weather forecast'? | Press Releases. Supersonic shock waves detected at the edge of the Solar System - a new study by European scientists clarifies conditions at our Earth's outermost shield against interstellar charged particles. The local interstellar cloudOur Solar System entered an interstellar cloud 10,000 years ago. Today it is speeding through this nebulosity at Mach 2 behind a supersonic shock wave - in much the same way that a Concorde crosses the Atlantic at supersonic speed.
Since its formation 4.6 billion years ago our Solar System has encountered numerous interstellar clouds, knots, filaments, shells and bubbles of different sizes and contents on its path through the Milky Way. For more than 80 years astronomers have been attracted by these past and future encounters, have tried to understand the physics behind them in order to decipher the dynamic interplay between the interstellar material and the Solar System. The heliosphereCharged particles from the Sun spiral out into space and form the solar wind. Notes. Integral. Explore the high-energy Universe - competition results 31 May 2012 Students from across Europe have been selected as the winners of the ESA’s ‘Explore the high-energy Universe’ competition.
Secondary school students were invited to choose from four projects relating to ESA’s Integral gamma-ray observatory in which they were challenged to Observe, Research, Design, or Build. To participate, students took on the roles of engineers, scientists, and astronomers to explore the extreme and ever-changing high-energy Universe, including black holes devouring matter, colossal explosions known as gamma-ray bursts, and supernova explosions. Entries were received from all over Europe, including France, Italy, and Romania. Since its launch in October 2002, Integral has been making ground-breaking observations of some of the most exotic and energetic processes in the Universe. This competition forms part of the celebrations to mark the mission’s 10th anniversary. Integral: gamma-ray observatory. INTEGRAL. The satellite was successfully launched on October 2002, the 17th. CNES was prime contractor for the SPI spectrometer, one of the two main instruments, in partnership with numerous French and foreign research laboratories.
Since November 2002, the Integral Spectrometer and IBIS delivered their first images and first spectra. The scientific data confirm the excellent operation of SPI and IBIS instruments and of the satellite. The first results were promising with observations of numerous gamma bursts, discovery of numerous sources in the Galaxy center region, cartography of the electron/positron annihilation line in this same region... After quite 8 years, INTEGRAL provides the astrophysical research with a major contribution concerning the gamma burst, the 511 keV annihilation gamma ray line, the nucleosynthesis, discovering new gamma ray sources, revealing a new gamma sky map.
INTEGRAL results in some figures: Number of revolution: 977. ESA/Hubble. . Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter . Cassini-Huygens. Cassini-Huygens Mission Cooperation. Satellites. HERSCHEL. PLANCK. Planck was designed to study the origin and evolution of the Universe in the submillimeter range of the electromagnetic spectrum. It will map the anisotropies, or small variations from place to place on the sky, of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is an "afterglow" of the Big Bang which fills all of space and has a temperature of 2.73 K.
Planck will make measurements with an angular resolution of about 5 arcminutes (which can be compared to the 13 arcminutes of its predecessor, WMAP) and a temperature sensitivity of about two parts per million. On November 19 2010, ESA's Science Program Committee approved an extension of Planck mission operations until December 31 2014, subjected to a mid-term review in 2012. The mission extension for the period end 2012 to mid august 2013, for LFI instrument, is now confirmed.
Corot. IAP. LAMBDA - COBE Images. Mysterious Pioneer Anomaly May Finally Be Solved. A flurry of recent papers could lay to rest once and for all a longstanding mystery in astrophysics: the so-called “Pioneer anomaly,” an as-yet-unexplained deceleration of NASA’s Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft in their wanderings beyond our solar system. NASA launched Pioneer 10 in 1972 and Pioneer 11 the following year, part of a mission to explore the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn, and their respective moons.
Those “flyby” missions were completed within a few years, but the plucky little Pioneers kept going, eventually traveling beyond our solar system, carrying messages for any aliens they might happen to encounter along the way. And all along scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab have been tracking their progress through Doppler radio transmissions. The debate has been raging ever since an astronomer named John Anderson first noticed the anomaly in 1980. But it didn’t seem to work. Dark Matter Drag? What could be causing this discrepancy?
Radiating Heat? Still with me? Hipparcos.