Meteor count

 

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rocket has launch the Progress 24P cargo spaceship to the International Space Station, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, at 02:12 GMT, on January 18th, 2007.
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STS-115, the nineteenth U.S. mission to the International Space Station, has launched from LC-39B, Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, US, at 15:15 GMT (11:15 a.m. EDT) on the 9th September, 2006. The flight will deliver the next port truss segment and associated set of power-generating solar arrays to the ISS.
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Atlas 5 rocket (AV-010) launched the New Horizons spacecraft to the planet Pluto from SLC-41, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, US, at 19:00 GMT 19th January 2006.
The rocket flew in the 551 vehicle configuration with a five-meter fairing, five strap-on solid rocket boosters and a single-engine Centaur upper stage. The launch was delayed from the 17th and 18th due to weather conditions.
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A team of astronomers working in Canada, France and the United States have discovered an unusual small body orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune, in the region astronomers call the Kuiper belt. This new object, that they have nicknamed `buffy`, is twice as far from the Sun as Neptune and is roughly half the size of Pluto. The body's highly unusual orbit is difficult to explain using previous theories of the formation of the outer Solar System.
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on the Japanese robotic probe Hayabusa, formerly called Muses-C, on a four-year mission to bring back samples from the asteroid .
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Jose Luis Ortiz of Sierra Nevada Observatory found a large Trans Neptunian object while checking out some old images from their TNO survey that was started in 2002.
The icy object, designated 2003 EL61, is at least 1,500km across. It orbits just beyond the orbit of Pluto, never coming closer to the Sun than the orbit of Neptune. And it has a moon!
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Dr. Michael Brown, associate professor of planetary astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, presented his discovery and major findings of the most distant object ever detected orbiting the Sun, at a press media teleconference held on the 29 th July, 2005..
He and his colleagues made the observations as part of a NASA-funded research project.
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was launched aboard a Russian Soyuz-Fregat rocket for the European Space Agency , from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. The craft will orbit Venus to study the planet's atmosphere and create global maps of surface temperatures.
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Reconnaissance Orbiter has launch, and on its way to study the planet Mars in unprecedented detail, providing more data than all previous missions combined.
The lift-off was on schedule, at the beginning of the launch window 11:43 to 13:43 GMT (7:43-9:43 am EDT) August 12th.
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has launched the impactor at 0707 GMT on Sunday to crash into Comet Temple 1.
The Deep Impact spacecraft was designed to launch a copper projectile into the surface of Comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, when the comet is 83 million miles from Earth. At 0552 GMT this 820-pound "impactor" hit the surface of the comet at approximately 23,000 miles per hour, the 3-by-3 foot projectile created a crater several hundred feet in size. Deep Impact's "flyby" spacecraft will collect pictures and data of the event. It will send the data back to Earth through the antennas of the Deep Space Network, though, if you live in Hawaii then you'll have a chance to view the impact through a 11" scope.
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Nominal impact time was July 04 05:52:00 UTC, (originally +/- 3 minutes), Earth received time. The actual impact occurred about 07:15 minutes earlier due to the light time delay. Current orbit solutions using astrometry determination said that the impact occurred about 15 Seconds late. (The 1-sigma uncertainty is around 12 seconds)

Martian methane mystery solved?
As Mars orbiters send back the best ever data about the chemicals present in the martian atmosphere and on the ground, rumours abound that scientists are beginning to detect no signs of life on the red planet.
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of infrared light reflected from the surface of Sedna reveal that it is probably unlike Pluto & Charon since Sedna's surface does not display evidence for a large amount of either water or methane ice. Due to Sedna’s extreme distance from the Sun, the frigid surface has probably been untouched for millions of years by anything except cosmic rays and solar ultraviolet radiation.
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in the constellation Hydra sets a new record for being the most heavy element-deficient star ever found. Its chemical composition, as measured with the Subaru Telescope High Dispersion Spectrograph, provides evidence of nucleosynthesis by the first generations of stars in the universe, and places new constraints on their masses and metal enrichment history in the very early universe. The new star HE1327-2326 has an unexpectedly low abundance of the metal lithium and an unexpectedly high amount of the metal strontium for such a primitive star.
To explain the strontium, it has been suggested that HE1327-2326 is a binary system. If the primitive star's binary companion had the opportunity to evolve, it might start to synthesise heavier metals including strontium.
The first generation of stars are believed to have formed several hundred million years after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.7 billion years ago. These stars were part of the transition from a universe that consisted only of hydrogen and helium gas to one that contains a variety of elements and objects including stars and galaxies.
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(VLA) radio telescope are taking advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to watch an old white dwarf known as V4334 Sgr (Sakurai's Object), in the constellation Sagittarius, suddenly stir back into new activity after coming to the end of its normal life. Their surprising results have forced them to change their ideas of how such a star can re-ignite its nuclear furnace for one final blast of energy.
Unusually, in 1996, the star flared up 100 times more quickly than computer simulations had predicted ruling out that it was a normal nova explosion . Astronomers believe that some such stars can undergo a final burst of fusion in a shell of helium that surrounds a core of heavier nuclei such as carbon and oxygen.
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Mars Orbiter Sees Rover Tracks
Starting its third mission extension this week after seven years of orbiting Mars, and using an innovative technique to capture pictures even sharper than most of the more than 170,000 it has already produced.
Under normal operating conditions, the highest resolution images the MOC narrow angle camera can obtain are about 1.4 - 1.5 meters per pixel . An image of 1.4 m/pixel permits objects approximately 4 to 5 meters across to be clearly resolved. The new technique known as cPROTO for "compensated Pitch and Roll Targeted Observation," allows the camera to obtain images that have better than 1 meter per pixel resolution. Typically, the images will have about 1.5 meters per pixel resolution in the cross-track (east-west) direction, and about 50 centimetres (half a meter) per pixel in the downtrack (north-south) direction.

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