Astronomy News Online

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	Orbital Recovery Ltd.,	has formally initiated the development of its ConeXpress ORS space tug in a program leading to the start of full-scale production this September, and the first launch in 2007. When operational, ConeXpress ORS will serve as an orbital "tugboat" -- providing the propulsion, navigation and guidance required to maintain telecommunications satellites in their proper orbits for years beyond the normal fuel depletion. And when they're done with, conveniently place them into a "disposal orbit", (for future generations to deal with?) ;).
	MARS LIFE? UPDATED	" I'm simply saying that life, uh, finds a way.." Strong signals of life on Mars has been detected by scientists at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and the European Space Agency. Neither Nasa nor the European Space Agency (ESA) has publicly announced the findings. Water does not mean life, however, and neither does methane. READ MORE
	Mysterious sub-atomic particles,	from another galaxy could be raining down on planet Earth. If so, it could explain controversial results from a particle-detection experiment deep inside mountains to the east of Rome.
	Russian designers	are working on a replacement for the veteran Soyuz spacecraft, the mainstay of the nation's space program since the 1960s. The new spacecraft, called the Clipper, will hold a crew of six compared to Soyuz's three. It will have a takeoff weight of 16 tons; and it will be reusable, capable of making up to 25 flights. Energiya can build the Clipper in five years if it receives sufficient government funding Energiya engineers are also working on a huge spaceship for a flight to Mars, set to weigh 660 tons...
	Hubble Replacement	camera to be built in Scotland. The UK Astronomy Technology Centre (ATC) at the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh has been given formal approval for the project, which will involve 100 scientists in ten countries. The £93 million super-sensitive instrument will form the key part of the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble, which will be launched in 2011. The James Webb will have a 21ft-diameter mirror, which is two-and-a-half times the size of the Hubble’s. The telescope will be placed 940,000 miles from Earth, in an orbit beyond the moon where it will be protected from stray light and heat from the sun and Earth. The 750lb Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which is the size of a washing machine, will enable astronomers to study the formation of stars and detect the first ones that were created after the Big Bang. It will operate at a cool -266C, and will give astronomers a thousand-times better view of the cosmos.
	X-43A Test:	The test was almost delayed by gusty winds. But, Nasa successfully flew its experimental X-43A research vehicle. The flight is part of the Hyper-X programme. To test the concept of a scramjet engine, a 10-second firing sent it to the edge of space. Initial indications are that the craft appeared to meet its milestone of propelling itself to Mach 7 , (seven times the speed of sound), on paper it has a top speed of 10,000 km/h! X-43 flew at 7,700 km/h (4,780 mph), Mach 7 Its speed was initially boosted by a rocket, which fell away at about 30,000 metres (100,000 feet) leaving the X-43A to fly under its own power for 10 seconds. The craft began gliding and conducting a series of high-speed manoeuvres before CRASHING into the sea at the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division Sea Range , off the coast of southern California. Because of the expense of recovery, there are no plans to retrieve the X-43A...
	Earth`s new moon	Earth has acquired another "quasi-moon" -- asteroid 2003 YN107 will encircle our planet for the next couple of years while it orbits the sun on a horseshoe-shaped path. The asteroid, 2003 YN107 is probably a 10 - 30 m big chunk of debris from an impact of a large space rock and the surface of our moon. 2003 YN107's orbital plane is almost the same as the earth's, but its unusual corkscrew-like path, means that during it`s 363 day orbit, it is sometimes ahead of us and sometimes behind,.. Perihelion 0.9738(AU) Aphelion 1.0171(AU) Orbital period 362.779 (days) Other "quasi-moons" are also known that loop around the earth: Cruithne, asteroid 2002 AA29, 1998 UP1 and 2000 PH5 The unusual Amors asteroid was discovered by Paul W. Chodas of NASA's Near Earth Object Program. For Orbit Diagram. Another small asteroid flew past Earth on March 27th 20:00 UT. 2004 FY15, which measures about 25 meters (75 feet) across, was only 0.6 lunar distances from our planet. At closest approach, the space rock was about as bright as a 14th magnitude star; now it's receding and fading fast.
	SETI completed	their most sensitive search yet for radio signals from intelligent life in space. They believe the best way to find ET is to look for a radio signal. Such signals can travel vast distances. The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, supported by Jodrell Bank, searched over a period of 10 years. `Project Phoenix` looked at 800 nearby stars with no evidence of a signal from ET. It seems "we live in a quiet neighbourhood" They say they have learned a lot, and plan another search next year with the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), As the array expands they’ll start a new targeted search covering several hundred thousand stars. Project Phoenix was so-named because it rose from the ashes of a Nasa initiative to search for intelligent life in space that was cancelled by US Congress in 1993. Despite this setback the scientists involved were determined to carry out their search. After the initial scramble the scientists managed to get an Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI) search system built and used it on the Parkes radio telescope in Australia in February 1995, just one month later than the original Nasa plan. Much of Project Phoenix's time was spent on the world's largest radio telescope, the 330 metre dish at Arecibo that takes advantage of the natural topography of Puerto Rico's mountains. Phoenix pioneered a technique of 'real-time' interference monitoring using a second radio telescope to determine if any suspicious signal was actually coming from deep space. Join the search!
	Supernova Remnant	revealed by the Chandra X-ray observatory. N49B (also known as SNR 0525-66.0) is the remains of an exploded star, and shows a cloud of multimillion degree gas that has been expanding for about 10,000 years. It is 160,000 light years (in the Large Magellanic Cloud), Coordinates (J2000) RA 05h 25m 26.04s | Dec -65º 59' 06.90" A specially processed version of this image reveals unexpectedly large concentrations of the element magnesium.
	Scientists create	fifth form of carbon: a spongy solid that is extremely lightweight and, unusually, attracted to magnets. The new structure was created by bombarding a carbon target with a laser capable of firing 10,000 pulses a second. As the carbon reached temperatures of around 10,000 ºC, it formed an intersecting web of carbon tubes, each just a few billionths of a metre long. The researchers have called the solid a 'nanofoam'. It is the fifth form of carbon known after graphite, diamond and two recently discovered types: hollow spheres, known as buckminsterfullerenes or buckyballs, and nanotubes.
	Nasa revealed	Mars water secrets... During another news conference on Tuesday, March 23rd at 7:00 pm UT, in Washington. NASA announced what it called a "major scientific finding" made by the Opportunity rovers. Opportunity is resting on what was once a salty, rippling body of water. And three billion years ago it was the shoreline of a salty sea. Readmore
	Mars Global Surveyor?	TES Dust And Temperature Maps Of Mars, 25th March 2004 (released 30 March) Mars daytime temperature Mars night temperature
	Jules Verne videometer	For the first time, the 'videometer' (VDM), a new technology device to ensure very precise automatic rendezvous operations between the 20.7 tonne Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle and the ISS, has been successfully tested this month.
	Mars Mystery:	Strange Spirals in Ice Caps Explained. The tilted planet causes ice on one side of a crack to heat and vaporize, deepening and widening the crack. Then the water vapour hits the shady, colder side of the growing canyon and refreezes. Eventually, chasms more than a half-mile (1 kilometre) deep developed, and they cover hundreds of miles of the polar regions. Sky watchers could not 'planet' any better.
	South Atlantic Hurrican!	What is believed the first-ever hurricane in the South Atlantic Ocean has been recorded... It is a minimal hurricane with winds of 74-95 mph, and was first spotted 275 miles off Brazil. It has no name because of its unique nature.
	Mathematicians,	Sir Michael Atiyah and Isadore Singer have been awarded the Abel Prize for their outstanding work in mathematics. The UK and US researchers developed what is now referred to as the Atiyah-Singer theorem about 40 years ago. It concerns the use of differential equations and has allowed physicists to develop new theories about the cosmos. Their theorem "is one of the great landmarks of 20th Century mathematics, influencing profoundly many of the most important later developments in topology, differential geometry and quantum field theory". The honour, from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, was set up to mark a field of scientific endeavour that is overlooked by the Nobel Prizes.
	A small 2 metre	asteroid, entered Earth's atmosphere and disintegrated in the skies above central California on April 4th at 06:52 a.m. (PDT). The resulting fireball was visible in broad daylight. Scotland celebrates 200 years since the first recorded meteorite listen realplayer stream.
	UFO near space station	The crew on board the International Space Station (ISS) have spotted an unidentified object outside the orbiting craft, on 7th February 2004. Astronaut Michael Foale and his Russian colleague Alexander Kaleri last week observed "a 20-centimetre long strip of soft material" which was floating in space. For the moment. It's not clear what it is. US and Russian experts are studying photos sent by the crew to Earth to try and determine its origin. It seems to have posed no danger to the station or crew. UPDATE! The two men aboard the international space station heard a strange metallic sound again on 2 April, four months after being startled by it the first time. Cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri was talking to flight controllers in Moscow when he heard a loud drumlike noise coming from the instrument panel of the station's Russian-built living quarters. NASA officials said all systems appeared to be operating properly. Readmore
	In an update :	on the Near Earth Object Observation Program, experts told the Senate subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, that they are on schedule to finding everything bigger than 1 kilometer (0.62 mile) in diameter that might approach the planet. "The survey officially started in 1998 and to date more than 700 objects of an estimated population of about 1,100 have been discovered, so the effort is now believed to be over 70 percent complete and well on the way to meeting its objective by 2008."
	Double Star!	, a joint Chinese-European space mission to study the Earth's magnetic environment, is up and running. The first of the mission's twin satellites, TC-1, was launched from China in December 2003 and will be joined by its partner in July. Double Star will operate for 18 months alongside a four-satellite mission launched in 2000, called Cluster. TC-1 takes 27 hours to orbit Earth and has a highly elliptical orbit. Its closest approach to Earth comes within 570 kilometres - just one tenth of the Earth's radius - while at its furthest it is about 13 Earth radii away.
	British scientists	want to send two mini-spacecraft to explore Phobos and Deimos, the mysterious moons of Mars.
	Cosmic fireball strikes Queensland, Australia.	It seems as if residents in the outback town of Winton saw a meteor "like 50,000 floodlights" as a huge fireball crashed to earth somewhere in central Queensland on March 31 2004. It may have been space junk or a meteorite, but it would have left a big hole somewhere...
	NASA Names Exploration Project Directors	NASA selected Garry M. Lyles as Deputy Director of Project Constellation, and Charles J. Precourt as Program Director of the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). It is NASA's first human exploratory spacecraft since Apollo. The CEV will carry astronauts to the moon as early as 2015. (er, hopefully)
	The suborbital rocket plane	SpaceShipOne made its second powered flight high above Mojave, California on the 8 th April 2004... A 40 second burn by the hybrid rocket motor sent it soaring to over 105,000 feet at Mach 2. Scaled Composites is the first company to have a license granted for piloted flight in a sub-orbital trajectory SpaceShipOne’s first powered flight took place on December 17, 2003
	Doh!	During corrosion inspection on spaceshuttle Discovery, technicians noticed that one of the gears in a rudder actuator had been installed backwards . This particular actuator was the top-most of four that control the air brakes on the tail. As luck turns out, if it had been the bottom-most actuator, loss of the shuttle and crew would have been nearly inevitable. Plans are in place to have four spares by the time Shuttle missions resume next year. This potentially disastrous mistake was made more than 20 years ago..!
	ERS-2 lives!	After a three-year gap, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is again routinely assimilating data from an instrument aboard the orbiting hurricane hunter ERS-2 that 'sees' wind fields over the ocean. The result is more accurate weather predictions – particularly in forecasting strong storms and hurricanes. Problems began to occur with it`s gyros used for spacecraft positioning. ERS-2 had also lost its onboard storage capacity, meaning that data from its instruments can only be acquired while within contact with a ground station... After six years of service the ESA engineers evolved an innovative 'gyro-less' mode of operating the spacecraf, and new software algorithms succeeded in compensating for the pointing degradation, regaining access to scatterometer measurements. Next month ESA's ERS-2 satellite celebrates its ninth anniversary in orbit. Its payload includes a radar scatterometer that works by firing a trio of high-frequency radar beams down to the ocean, then analysing the pattern of backscatter reflected up again. Wind-driven ripples on the ocean surface modify the radar backscatter, and as the energy in these ripples increases with wind velocity, so backscatter increases as well. Scatterometer results enable the measurements of wind speed and direction across the water surface. What makes ERS-2's scatterometer especially valuable is that its C-band radar frequency is almost unaffected by heavy rain, so it can return useful wind data even from the heart of the fiercest storms – and is the sole scatterometer of this type currently in orbit.
	Microsoft co-founder	Paul Allen, has pledged to donate $US13.5 million ($17.99 million) for research into extra-terrestrial life (SETI). With the contribution, Allen will have given $US25 million ($33.32 million) for construction of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a network of 350 radio telescopes being built to find signs of life in space, The Array will consist of approximately 350 6.1-meter offset Gregorian dishes arrayed at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory site. Given the number of antennas and large size of the primary beam (approximately 4 degrees at 21 cm wavelength), this array will have an unprecedented amount of flexibility in observing. They will also be capable of measuring the density of the early universe, and the formation of stars and magnetic fields. One network of 32 telescopes will be available for research by the end of 2004 and the entire network of 350 telescopes will be completed "late in the decade," Amiga.Org SETI@Home group launched!
	NASA's Stardust probe	has had a flyby encounter with Comet `Wild-2`, on 1944 GMT, January 2 2004. The Discovery-class deep-space explorer passed within 240 km of the `nucleus`, and sampled pristine cometary dust particles, returning to Earth in January 2006. The craft 389 million km from Earth sent back startling images. Comet Wild-2 is probably 5.4 km (3.3 miles) across. It sailed past the probe at a relative speed of 21,960 km per hour (13,650 miles per hour) During the flyby, the highest resolution images ever taken of a comet's nucleus were obtained and have been the subject of intense study since the flyby. A short exposure image showing tremendous surface detail was overlain on a long exposure image taken just 10 seconds later showing jets.
	LOOKOUT!	The Newly-discovered asteroid 2004 FH had a close encounter with our planet on March 18th, 2200 GMT. It will come 43,000 km from the Earth's surface! That just slightly higher than most geosynchronous satellites , that orbit at an altitude of 35,800 km... 2004 FH's point of closest approach with the Earth was over the South Atlantic Ocean. ReadMore.
	Spherules Identified!.	The Mars rover Opportunity has now solved the puzzle as to where the hematite is that was spotted by the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. The answer is in the spherules! ReadMore.
	Solved!	ESA's International Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (Integral) has resolved the diffuse glow of gamma rays in the centre of our Galaxy and has shown that most of it is produced by a hundred individual sources. Initially, astronomers believed that the glow was caused by interactions involving the atoms of the gas that pervades the Galaxy. Whilst this theory could explain the diffuse nature of the emission, since the gas is ubiquitous, it failed to match the observed power of the gamma rays. The gamma rays produced by the proposed mechanisms would be much weaker than those observed. The mystery has remained unanswered for decades. The first clues about a new class of gamma-ray objects came last October, when Integral discovered an intriguing gamma-ray source, known as IGRJ16318-4848. The data from Integral and ESA's other high-energy observatory XMM-Newton suggested that this object is a binary system, probably including a black hole or neutron star, embedded in a thick cocoon of cold gas and dust. When gas from the companion star is accelerated and swallowed by the black hole, energy is released at all wavelengths, mostly in the gamma rays.
	New Solar Object!.	The most distant object orbiting the sun has been detected. It’s about 1/3 the size of the earth, 3 billion kilometres further away from the Sun than Pluto. This object has been provisionally named "Sedna", after the Inuit goddess of the sea. Measurements suggest that Sedna has a diameter between 1,180 to 2,360km in diameter and is a half-rock and half-ice mixture. This would make it the biggest find in the solar system since Pluto was discovered 74 years ago. An official NASA announcement was made at 1800 UTC 15th March. ReadMore.
	At last!	On the 66th Martian day of its mission, the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit finished a drive and sent back this navigation camera image mosaic revealing "Bonneville" crater in its entirety. The crater does not appear to harbour any sedimentary rock outcroppings, as was found at the Opportunity landing site. The rocks around the rim appear to be similar to rocks the rover has already encountered. They are all thought to have been cast out by an ancient impact.
		An hour before sunrise, the Spirit rover took the first picture of Earth ever made from the surface of another planet. Another sky photo from Spirit shows a meteor or the Viking 2 Orbiter spacecraft, still circling Mars long after its 1970s mission ended.
	A rare solar crossing	of the Sun by the Martian moon Deimos on the 4 th March was captured by the Panoramic Camera of Opportunity Mars rover. The solar transit of the Martian moon occurs only twice per Mars year (one Mars year equals roughly two Earth years). Deimos is a dark body that appears to be composed of C-type surface materials, similar to that of asteroids found in the outer asteroid belt. Named after the Roman God of dread, Deimos is the smaller of Mars' two moons. Deimos whirls around Mars every 30 hours. The natural moon is 10 by 7.5 miles (16 by 12 kilometres) in size...

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