Astronomical News

[محمدرضا صادقیان]

Hello.
I want to put this post to talk about latest news around astronomy, Its a new astronomical news page......
I'll appreciate if u help me with this post........

Thank u All

[Saeed Jafari]

NuSTAR Mission Status Report

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) passed its Post-Launch Assessment Review at JPL this week, clearing the way for the mission to enter into its science operations phase in the next month. NuSTAR is currently in the final stages of "Phase C/D," or the design and development phase, which included building and testing the flight hardware, launch and early operations (e.g., spacecraft checkout, mast deployment, instrument commissioning and calibrations). In August, NuSTAR will
enter "Phase E," or the operations phase, meaning that it will primarily gather science data



Artist's concept of NuSTAR on orbit. NuSTAR has a 10-m (30') mast that deploys after launch to separate the optics modules (right) from the detectors in the focal plane (left) Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/nu...r20120727.html

[Saeed Jafari]

Curiosity Takes Us Back to Mars

NASA is back on Mars – and getting ready for the next mission to the Red Planet! After an astounding 352 million mile journey and a harrowing landing that demonstrated cutting-edge technology, Curiosity, the largest rover ever sent to another planet, is in place and ready to work. This robotic laboratory will seek answers to one of humanity’s oldest questions as it investigates whether conditions have favored development of microbial life on the Red Planet. The mission is a critical planetary science mission -- and a precursor to sending humans to the Red Planet in the 2030’s, a goal set forth by President Obama

It’s another great leadership moment for our nation and a sign of the continued strength of NASA’s many programs in science, aeronautics and human spaceflight. It’s also important to remember that the $2.5 billion investment made in this project was not spent on Mars, but right here on Earth, supporting more than 7,000 jobs in at least 31 state

http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/bolden...232802884.html

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Orion Spacecraft Water Impact Testing



Water impact test of an 18,000-pound (8,165 kilogram) test version of the Orion spacecraft at NASA's Langley Research Center on Thursday, Aug. 23, 2012.



Swing drop testing began last summer at Langley's Hydro Impact Basin to certify the Orion spacecraft for water landings. In this series of tests, Orion is being dropped vertically into the pool for the first time, which will help fine-tune the way NASA predicts Orion's landing loads.



The Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA’s next crew capsule and heavy-lift rocket, will provide an entirely new capability for human exploration. Designed to be flexible for launching spacecraft for crew and cargo missions, SLS and Orion will expand human presence beyond low Earth orbit and enable new missions of exploration across the solar system.



Image Credit: NASA

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Galaxy Evolution Explorer Media Telecon: Aug. 15, 2007, 1 p.m. EST (10 a.m. PST)

Astronomers are scheduled to announce new findings about a star unlike any seen before at a media teleconference Wednesday, Aug. 15, at 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST). The findings are from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer.

+ News release

Toll free number: 1-800-593-1179 | International toll number: 210-795-9369
Passcode: Galex

An instant replay of the telecon is available 24 hours a day through Aug. 22:
Toll free number: 866-505-9257
International toll number: 203-369-1881

Note to TV reporters: Broadcast quality video file (animation, images and sound bites) to accompany this story are available through the Pathfire distribution service. In the DMG Content Provider Panel, select News, Video News Feeds, VNF Provider B. Select the NASA-JPL tab. Double-click on the Slug to preview the package contents. For other video options, call JPL Media Relations at 818-354-5011.

Participants:+ Bios page
Christopher Martin, Principal Investigator, NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Michael Shara, Curator, Department of Astrophysics, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, N.Y.
Mark Seibert, Astronomer, Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Pasadena, Calif.

Images


1. Johnny Appleseed of the Cosmos
A new ultraviolet mosaic from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows a speeding star named Mira (pronounced my-rah) that is leaving an enormous trail of "seeds" for new solar systems.
+ Full image and caption

2. A Real Shooting Star
This artist's animation illustrates a star flying through our galaxy at supersonic speeds, leaving a 13-light-year-long trail of glowing material in its wake.
Play animation: + Play animation - Lower resolution (Quicktime - 6.5Mb)
+ Play animation (Quicktime - 27Mb)
+ Full image and caption

3. Evolution of Mira's Enormous Tail
This chart illustrates the length (top) and age (bottom) of a long comet-like tail of material trailing behind a speeding star called Mira (pronounced My-rah).
+ Full image and caption

4. Anatomy of a Shooting Star
A close-up view of a star racing through space faster than a speeding bullet can be seen in this image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer.
+ Full image and caption

5. Supersonic Bullet
A bullet traveling through air at about 1.5 times the speed of sound can be seen in this image.
+ Full image and caption

6. Mira's Tail There All Along
As this composite demonstrates, Mira's tail is only visible in ultraviolet light (top), and does not show up in visible light (bottom).

[گلناز]

Orion Test Article Vertical Drop (25 ft)

Water impact test of an 18,000-pound (8,165 kilogram) test version of the Orion spacecraft dropped from 25 feet (7.62 meters) at NASA's Langley Research Center on Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2012.

NASA is conducting these vertical drop tests to help fine-tune the way NASA predicts Orion's landing loads.

The Hydro Impact Basin is 115 feet long, 90 feet wide and 20 feet deep (35 x 27 x 6 meters). It is located at the west end of Langley's historic Landing and Impact Research Facility, or Gantry, where Apollo astronauts trained for moon walks.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html

[Saeed Jafari]

Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe

(Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team)

Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, it revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time.

The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive, and contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see

http://www.nasa.gov/

[yperseusy]

Representatives from the science-funding agencies and library communities of 29 countries are meeting at CERN today to launch the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) initiative.

At a meeting last week the CERN Finance Committee officially approved the award of contracts for the provision of peer-review, open access and other publication services for the benefit of SCOAP3. The consortium aims to provide unrestricted access to high-energy-physics (HEP) research literature in its final, peer-reviewed form, by sharing the cost of the peer-review service between funding agencies, research institutions, libraries and library consortia, while publishers make electronic versions of their journals open access.

"The Finance Committee's approval is a watershed, with a large exclamation mark!" says CERN librarian Jens Vigen. "After years of design and consensus building, we can now move on to the implementation phase of the project. This is the first time ever that an entire field is concretely moving towards open-access publishing."

The goal of open access is to grant anyone free access to the results of scientific research. But the current model of scientific publishing – where journal access is restricted to paying customers and reuse of material is hindered by copyright restrictions – is at odds with this idea. Traditionally libraries have paid, on behalf of their readers, for access to content. However, the service needed by the community is the peer-review and quality-assurance service, as in the field of high-energy physics community preprints of articles are generally made available online long before they appear in journals. SCOAP3 is putting this service at the centre, remunerating the publishing industry for it, while content will be open access.

"The issue is that people in our field don't tend to read the journals, they read the arXiv," says Vigen. "This said, peer-reviewed journals add an indispensable quality stamp. The new system enshrines the role of the journals in providing the peer-review service rather than repositories of content."

In the SCOAP3 model, HEP funding agencies, research institutions, libraries and library consortia, which today buy journal subscriptions to implicitly support the peer-review service, instead pool their resources explicitly to cover the cost of this service, while publishers make the electronic versions of their journals open access. SCOAP3 partners recover their contributions by redirecting the funds they currently use for journal subscriptions.

With a projected SCOAP3 budget of 36 million Swiss francs over three years, 12 journals from 7 publishers are now on the list for a possible contract for the provision of peer-review, open access and other publication services. Over 6600 articles relevant to the field were published in these journals in 2011; this represents the vast majority of the literature.

"It has taken an amazing team effort to get here, with volunteers from the library community, research institutions and funding agencies working hard together to steer the initiative, alongside constructive discussions with the publishers of the field," says Salvatore Mele, head of Open Access at CERN, who convened the SCOAP3 Steering Committee over a year and a half. "This bodes well for the next crucial steps as SCOAP3 moves forward."

"I think neighbouring fields like nuclear physics and astrophysics might be inspired by this model in some way," says Vigen. "When we initiated the process six years ago, open access publishing was in its infancy – today it has become mainstream. We have entered into an era that will accelerate science."

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What's Up for October. Ceres, Vesta and two meteor showers.

Hello and welcome. I'm Jane Houston Jones at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

You can spot the two brightest objects in the asteroid belt this month and throughout autumn.

You'll find both Ceres and Vesta near Jupiter, among the stars of the constellations Taurus and Gemini. Look to the eastern sky in the late evening this month. You can't miss Jupiter.

These two objects shine at a magnitude of 7 and 8, making them challenging but rewarding objects to find in your telescope.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft completed its orbit of Vesta in August after over a year of investigation. Now Dawn is on its way to Ceres and will arrive in February 2015.

A third asteroid, Pallas, is also visible through telescopes in the southeastern sky this month.

Two meteor showers grace the October skies, too.

The Orionids will peak on the 21st. You'll see more just before midnight, after the moon sets.

The Taurid meteor shower, radiating from the constellation Taurus the bull, doesn't peak until November 10 but is active beginning October 20.

You can tell the difference between the two showers, even though the constellations appear near each other. Taurids are slow, and you might see bright fireballs. The Orionids are fast and mostly faint.

To learn about Dawn and all of NASA's missions, visit www.nasa.gov.

That's all for this month. .

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Each of these images was captured from a different perspective by one of NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft on Oct. 14, 2012. The image on the left, STEREO-B, shows a dark vertical line slightly to the upper left of center. Only by looking at the image on the right, captured by STEREO-A from a different direction, is this feature revealed to be a giant prominence of solar material bursting through the sun's atmosphere. Credit: NASA/STEREO
› View larger, › View STEREO B larger, › View STEREO A larger

On the evening of Oct. 25, 2006, the twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft launched into space, destined for fairly simple orbits: both circle the sun like Earth does, STEREO-A traveling in a slightly smaller and therefore faster orbit, STEREO-B traveling in a larger and slower orbit. Those simple orbits, however, result in interesting geometry. As one spacecraft gained an increasing lead over Earth, the other trailed further and further behind. In February of 2011, each STEREO spacecraft was situated on opposite sides of the sun, and on Sept. 1, 2012, the two spacecraft and and the Solar Dynamics Observatory (at Earth) formed an equal-sided triangle, with each observatory providing overlapping views of the entire sun.

› View larger
Since its launch in 2006, the STEREO spacecraft have drifted further and further apart to gain different views of the sun. Credit: NASA/GSFC

By providing such unique viewpoints, STEREO has offered scientists the ability to see all sides of the sun simultaneously for the first time in history, augmented with a view from Earth's perspective by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). In addition to giving researchers a view of active regions on the sun before they even come over the horizon, combining two views is crucial for three-dimensional observations of the giant filaments that dance off the sun's surface or the massive eruptions of solar material known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Examine the images below to see how a feature on the sun can look dramatically different from two perspectives.

› View larger
This map of the full sun on Oct. 14, 2012, was created by images from, ­ in order from left to right,­ STEREO-A, STEREO-B and SDO. Credit: NASA/STEREO/SDO/GSFC

[Saeed Jafari]

New Study Brings a Doubted Exoplanet 'Back from the Dead'



A second look at data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is reanimating the claim that the nearby star Fomalhaut hosts a massive exoplanet. The study suggests that the planet, named Fomalhaut b, is a rare and possibly unique object that is completely shrouded by dust.

Fomalhaut is the brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus and lies 25 light-years away.

In November 2008, Hubble astronomers announced the exoplanet, named Fomalhaut b, as the first one ever directly imaged in visible light around another star. The object was imaged just inside a vast ring of debris surrounding but offset from the host star. The planet's location and mass -- no more than three times Jupiter's -- seemed just right for its gravity to explain the ring's appearance

Recent studies have claimed that this planetary interpretation is incorrect. Based on the object's apparent motion and the lack of an infrared detection by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, they argue that the object is a short-lived dust cloud unrelated to any plane

http://www.nasa.gov