quote:On challenging slopes that NASA's Mars rovers began exploring this month, both Spirit and Opportunity have found new surprises for the folks back home.
quote:Like a woolly mammoth trapped in Arctic ice, Saturn's small moon Phoebe may be a frozen artifact of a bygone era, some four billion years ago. The finding is suggested by new data from the Cassini spacecraft.
quote:There's nothing worse than a satellite that can't make decisions. Rather than organizing data, it simply spews out everything it collects, swamping scientists with huge amounts of information. It's like getting a newspaper with no headlines or section pages in which all the stories are strung together end-to-end.
quote:Saturn is now a day away for the Cassini spacecraft, a seasoned traveler that began its journey nearly seven years ago.
On June 30 at 7:36 p.m. Pacific Time (10:36 p.m. EDT), Cassini will begin executing a series of commands to enter orbit around the ringed planet. The spacecraft will fire its main engine for a crucial 96 minutes to slow down and be captured in orbit about Saturn.
quote:The international Cassini-Huygens mission has successfully entered orbit around Saturn. At 9:12 p.m. PDT on Wednesday, flight controllers received confirmation that Cassini had completed the engine burn needed to place the spacecraft into the correct orbit. This begins a four-year study of the giant planet, its majestic rings and 31 known moons.
quote:What would our Milky Way galaxy look like if we could travel outside it and snap a picture? It might look a lot like a new image by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of a spiral galaxy called NGC 7331 - a virtual twin of our Milky Way.
quote:MOST, Canada’s first space telescope, celebrates its first birthday today, but its latest surprising results could spoil the party for other astronomers whose earlier results are now being questioned.
quote:“The lack of a pulse doesn't mean the star Procyon is dead,” explained MOST Mission Scientist Dr. Jaymie Matthews of the University of British Columbia.
(Right - not dead, but undead! Somebody stake that star...)
quote:The first pictures taken by the Cassini spacecraft after it began orbiting Saturn show breathtaking detail of Saturn's rings, and other science measurements reveal that Saturn's magnetic field pulsed in size as Cassini approached the planet.
quote:About two years ago, three University of Cincinnati aerospace engineering students launched an idea: To design, manufacture parts for, construct and blast off a rocket they’d build from scratch.
quote:Just two days after the Cassini spacecraft entered Saturn orbit, preliminary science results are already beginning to show a complex and fascinating planetary system. [...] new findings show the Cassini Division contains relatively more "dirt" than ice.
(Somebody get up there and clean up those rings! Can't leave 'em dirty like that...)
quote:Our neighbourhood galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) lies in the Constellation of Dorado and is sprinkled with a number of regions harbouring recent and ongoing star formation.
quote:COLUMBUS, Ohio – Scientists at Ohio State University have found that a formaldehyde-based chemical is 100 times more common in parts of our galaxy than can be explained.
(So, is space well-preserved, or just smelly? Or both?)
quote:In the last few decades, scientists have discovered that there is a lot more to the universe than meets the eye: the cosmos appears to be filled with not just one, but two invisible constituents –dark matter and dark energy – whose existence has been proposed based solely on their gravitational effects on ordinary matter and energy.
quote:Originally posted by Henry J: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/07/040705082626.htm [QUOTE]The Cassini spacecraft has revealed surface details of Saturn's moon Titan and imaged a huge cloud of gas surrounding the planet-sized moon.
(Cloud of gas? What's that moon been eating?)
You silly goose... given the known-since-childhood FACT that our moon is made of green cheese, why shouldn't Saturn's moon be made of the same, or worse?
And if green cheese, or worse, isn't cause for a huge cloud of gas... well then I don't know what is!
quote:On top the windswept summit of a Hawaiian volcano, a NASA instrument attached to the Japanese Subaru telescope measured distant winds raging on a strange world -- Titan, the giant moon of Saturn -- to help the robotic Huygens probe as it descends through Titan's murky atmosphere next January.
quote:The best view ever of Saturn's rings in the ultraviolet indicates there is more ice toward the outer part of the rings, hinting at ring origin and evolution, say two University of Colorado at Boulder researchers involved in the Cassini mission.
(Okay, but is there any one ring that rules them all?)
quote:NASA-funded scientists have created the first three-dimensional (3-D) view of massive solar eruptions called Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs). The result is critical for a complete understanding of CMEs, which, when directed at Earth, may disrupt radio communications, satellites and power systems.
quote:A fleet of spacecraft dispersed throughout the solar system gave the best picture to date of the effects of blast waves from solar storms as they propagate through the solar system.
quote:A rare glimpse back in time into the universe's early evolution has revealed something startling: mature, fully formed galaxies where scientists expected to discover little more than infants.
(Mature? So they're what, already dating? Borrowing the car?)
quote:Four NASA crewmembers will look to the deep seas this month to help prepare for journeys into deep space. They'll use an undersea laboratory to study what it may be like to live and work in other extreme environments, such as the Moon and Mars. [...] in the Aquarius Underwater Laboratory [...]
(It's the dawning of the age of Aquarius? A-quar-i-us... - yeah, I know I'm off-key, so what?)
quote:A careful analysis of observations by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory of a rare quadruple quasar has uncovered evidence that possibly a single star in a foreground galaxy magnified X-rays coming from the quasar. This discovery gives astronomers a new and extremely precise probe of the gas flow around the supermassive black hole that powers the quasar.
quote:Nearly five billion years ago, the giant gaseous planets Jupiter and Saturn formed, apparently in radically different ways. So says a scientist at the Laboratory who created exhaustive computer models based on experiments in which the element hydrogen was shocked to pressures nearly as great as those found inside the two planets.
quote:July 14, 2004 -- The Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology (DART) flight demonstrator, a spacecraft developed to prove technologies to locate and maneuver near an orbiting satellite, today arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., in preparation for a fall 2004 launch.
quote:An Ohio State University astronomer and his colleagues have directly measured the mass of that star -- the first time such a feat has been accomplished for any single star other than our own sun.
quote:As winter approaches on Mars, NASA's Opportunity rover continues to inch deeper into the stadium-sized crater dubbed "Endurance." On the other side of the planet, the Spirit rover found an intriguing patch of rock outcrop while preparing to climb up the "Columbia Hills" backward. This unusual approach to driving is part of a creative plan to accommodate Spirit's aging front wheel.
quote:ARLINGTON, Va. -- While rovers and orbiting spacecraft scour Mars searching for clues to its past, researchers have uncovered another piece of the Red Planet in Antarctica.
(But, when they find meteorites like that in movies, it usually has consequences... )
quote:The GalileoSat development and in-orbit validation phase is well under way and the European Space Agency (ESA) has just released its procurement process to Industry indicating that the first completely civil satellite navigation system is moving forward.
(If this is the first one that's civil, does that mean the earlier ones were uncivil? )
quote:Using ESA’s Integral and XMM-Newton observatories, an international team of astronomers has found more evidence that massive black holes are surrounded by a doughnut-shaped gas cloud, called a torus.
quote:A new study has caught a newborn star similar to the sun in a fiery outburst. X-ray observations of the flare-up, which are the first of their kind, are providing important new information about the early evolution of the sun and the process of planet formation.
quote:Scientists using measurements from NASA's Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite have discovered that Venus and sunspots have something in common: they both block some of the sun's energy going to Earth.
(They discovered that shade reduces sunlight? Hmmm.)
quote:NASA’s first trip to Mercury in 30 years – and the closest look ever at the innermost planet – starts in August with the predawn launch of the MESSENGER spacecraft from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.
quote:The X-ray/optical comparison of the region surrounding McNeil's Nebula shows that the position of a source detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is coincident with that of a bright infrared and optical source at the apex of the nebula.
quote:NASA is moving ahead with plans to redesign a part of the Space Shuttle external fuel tank that investigators believe played a critical role in the Space Shuttle Columbia accident.
quote:Encircled in purple stratospheric haze, Saturn's largest moon, Titan, appears as a softly glowing sphere in this colorized image taken on July 3, 2004, one day after Cassini's first flyby of that moon. Titan has a dense atmosphere composed primarily of nitrogen with a few percent methane. The atmosphere can undergo photochemical processes to form hazes.
quote:(August 3, 2004) -- NASA's MESSENGER – set to become the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury – launched today at 2:15:56 a.m. EDT aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. [...] MESSENGER, short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, Geochemistry, and Ranging, [...]
quote:NASA's Spirit rover has climbed higher into rocky hills on Mars, and its twin, Opportunity, has descended deeper into a crater, but both rovers, for the time being, are operating with some restrictions while team members diagnose unexpected behavior.
(Over hill, over dale, we have hit the dusty trail...)
quote:The Cassini spacecraft, which began its tour of the Saturn system just over a month ago, has detected lightning and a new radiation belt at Saturn, and a glow around the planet's largest moon, Titan. The spacecraft's radio and plasma wave science instrument detected radio waves generated by lightning. "We are detecting the same crackle and pop one hears when listening to an AM radio broadcast during a thunderstorm," said Dr. Bill Kurth, deputy principal investigator on the radio and plasma wave instrument, University of Iowa, Iowa City.
worse? 
