News.Astrohobby.PL Blog

The Astro2010 report, New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics, will be publically released in pre-publication form via the National Academies Press website at 11:00 a.m. EDT on Friday, August 13, 2010. The fully edited final publication version of the report will emerge later in the year.

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A spectacular new image from ESO’s Wide Field Imager at the La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the brilliant and unusual star WR 22 and its colourful surroundings. WR 22 is a very hot and bright star that is shedding its atmosphere into space at a rate many millions of times faster than the Sun. It lies in the outer part of the dramatic Carina Nebula from which it formed.

TanDEM-X, Germany's new Earth observation satellite, is scheduled for launch on Monday, 21 June 2010 at 04:14 CEST. Together with its twin, TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X will survey all 150 million square kilometres of Earth's land surface several times during its three-year mission. We will stream the TanDEM-X launch live from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, as well as an exclusive infotainment programme from the control centre in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany.

NASA selected Orbital Sciences Corp.'s, Technical Services Division in Greenbelt, Md., for the agency's Sounding Rockets Operations contract.

Recently, technicians at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., completed a series of cryogenic tests on six James Webb Space Telescope beryllium mirror segments at the center's X-ray & Cryogenic Facility. During testing, the mirrors were subjected to extreme temperatures dipping to -415 degrees Fahrenheit, permitting engineers to measure in extreme detail how the shape of the mirror changes as it cools. The Webb telescope has 18 mirrors, each of which will be tested twice in the Center's X-ray & Cryogenic Facility to ensure that the mirror will maintain its shape in a space environment -- once with bare polished beryllium and then again after a thin coating of gold is applied. The cryogenic test gauges how each mirror changes temperature and shape over a range of operational temperatures in space. This helps predict how well the telescope will image infrared sources. The mirrors are designed to stay cold to allow scientists to observe the infrared light they reflect using a telescope and instruments optimized to detect this light. Warm objects give off infrared light, or heat. If the Webb telescope mirror is too warm, the faint infrared light from distant galaxies may be lost in the infrared glow of the mirror itself. Thus, the Webb telescope's mirrors need to operate in a deep cold or cryogenic state, at around -379 degree Fahrenheit. Image Credit: NASA

NASA managers will discuss an upcoming spacewalk at the International Space Station during a news briefing at 1 p.m. CDT on Tuesday, Aug. 3.

During a total solar eclipse,

What are those strange rock structures?