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Astronomers led by Prof. Quentin Parker at the University of Hong Kong and Prof. Albert Zijlstra at the University of Manchester have discovered the closest ever galaxy collision.
It's 30 million light years away, but that's fairly nearby by astronomical standards. The galaxy has been named "Kathryn's Wheel", partly after the wife of one of the astronomers, and partly because it looks a bit like the firework.
A potential advancement in the United States' electric propulsion capability for the future of spaceflight is being underscored by a new NASA contract to support work on the VASIMR project – short for the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket.
Meet Copenhagen Suborbitals (CS), the small Danish organization with a big dream – launching a human being into space, and returning them safely to Earth in a shoestring-budget micro rocket. The CS website conveys a simple mission statement, to prove that access to space does not have to come in the form of an exorbitantly expensive government-subsidized project. CS is proving that a driven group of individuals can achieve what would at first glance appear to be the unachievable, and strike a blow for the democratization of space.
Last Friday, 21 August, ESA’s billion-star surveyor, Gaia, completed its first year of science observations in its main survey mode.
After launch on 19 December 2013 and a six-month long in-orbit commissioning period, the satellite started routine scientific operations on 25 July 2014. Located at the Lagrange point L2, 1.5 million km from Earth, Gaia surveys stars and many other astronomical objects as it spins, observing circular swathes of the sky. By repeatedly measuring the positions of the stars with extraordinary accuracy, Gaia can tease out their distances and motions through the Milky Way galaxy.
For the first 28 days, Gaia operated in a special scanning mode that sampled great circles on the sky, but always including the ecliptic poles. This meant that the satellite observed the stars in those regions many times, providing an invaluable database for Gaia’s initial calibration.
At the end of that phase, on 21 August 2014, Gaia commenced its main survey operation, employing a scanning law designed to achieve the best possible coverage of the whole sky.
Since the start of its routine phase, the satellite recorded 272 billion positional or astrometric measurements 54.4 billion brightness or photometric data points, and 5.4 billion spectra.
The Gaia team have spent a busy year processing and analysing these data, en route towards the development of Gaia’s main scientific products, consisting of enormous public catalogues of the positions, distances, motions and other properties of more than a billion stars. Because of the immense volumes of data and their complex nature, this requires a huge effort from expert scientists and software developers distributed across Europe, combined in Gaia’s Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC).
“The past twelve months have been very intense, but we are getting to grips with the data, and are looking forward to the next four years of nominal operations,” says Timo Prusti, Gaia project scientist at ESA.
It's been 26 years since a NASA flyby to Neptune and the agency dropped some big news at the Outer Planets Assessment Group meeting, saying that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL) will be studying a flagship mission to Neptune or Uranus, or even both.
If the mission is approved, the resulting spacecraft will be following in the footsteps of the Mars2020 and Europa Multiple Flyby missions. According to Jim Green, NASA's Planetary Science Division Director, the proposed mission should not exceed $2 billion. Previous flagship missions include the Voyager, Galileo and Cassini.
