NASA revises Mars missions
NASA’s Mission Control Center hoped that the Deep Space Two micoprobe had landed safely and gone into a ‘sleep’ safety mode. But all attempts to contact the probes have failed. Durin...
XMM launches
XMM will be in a highly elliptical orbit to keep it away from interference caused by the Sun’s glare. The telescope’s large size and unusual orbit explains why XMM was launched from Ariane...
Eclipse confirms extrasolar planet
According to calculations by Marcy and colleagues, the planet has 63 percent of the mass of Jupiter and orbits the star every 3.5 days. On Thursday, the next time the star is eclipsed, more telescopes...
Hubble Space Telescope shuts down
This is only the third time Hubble has been shut down since its launch in 1990. Three weeks of scientific data will be lost. During the repair mission, astronauts will replace all six gyroscopes, a fi...
First evidence for planet orbiting a binary star
The majority of stars in the universe are believed to be in binary systems, but previously no one had produced any evidence to show that such systems could contain planets. The 20 planets that have be...
NASA plans astrometric mission
Like ESA’s recent Hipparcos mission, FAME will use the parallax method to determine the stars’ positions: as the telescope and the Earth orbit the sun, the position of the stars will chang...
Has Hubble seen dark matter?
When the astronomers – Rodrigo Ibata from the European Southern Observatory, Harvey Richer and Douglas Scott from the University of British Columbia in Canada, and Ronald Gilliland from the Spac...
Read article: Chandra delights astronomers
Chandra delights astronomers
The image of G21.5-0.9, a supernova remnant which is 16,000 light years from Earth, shows a bright central source (the neutron star) with bright nebula and surrounded by a much larger diffuse cloud. T...
Webwatchers avoid cloudy eclipse
The European satellite organisation Eumetsat will update pictures every 10 minutes of the Moon’s shadow as it rushes across the globe. Meanwhile, the European Space Agency has brought together a...
Gas cloud defines extragalactic distance
The team were able to measure the distance because NGC4258 is one of 22 nearby galaxies that have active nuclei consisting of a supermassive black hole (over 100 million solar masses) surrounded by a ...
