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Astronomy News

2/24/04 SCIENTISTS WATCH NEUTRON STAR EXPLOSION IN REAL TIME

A neutron star halfway across the Milky Way galaxy is ready for its close-up. A rare and massive explosion on this star illuminated the region and allowed scientists to view details never seen before, virtually bringing the scientists to the action occurring just a few miles above the star's surface.
2/24/04 EUROPE PREPARES MISSION TO SEARCH FOR LIFE ON MARS

Before humans can leave their boot prints on the dusty surface of Mars, many questions have to be answered and many problems solved. One of the most fundamental questions - one that has intrigued humankind for centuries - is whether life has ever existed on Mars, the most Earthlike of all the planets.
2/20/04 RADIO STORMS ON JUPITER

NASA Science News for February 20, 2004

Giant Jupiter is a source of strange-sounding radio noises. Now anyone can listen to them, live, using a NASA-sponsored audio stream on the Internet.

2/18/04 A BLACK HOLE RIPS A STAR APART

NASA Science News for February 18, 2004

Two orbiting x-ray telescopes have caught a supermassive black hole in theact of ripping a star apart.

2/16/04 FARTHEST KNOWN GALAXY IN THE UNIVERSE DISCOVERED

An international team of astronomers may have set a new record in discovering what is the most distant known galaxy in the Universe. Located an estimated 13 billion light-years away, the object is being viewed at a time only 750 million years after the big bang, when the Universe was barely 5 percent of its current age.
2/16/04 TWIN MARS ROVERS CONTINUE THEIR SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITIES

The Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is examining a collection of rocks, including a flaky one nicknamed Mimi, on its lengthy drive to a crater. Meanwhile, Opportunity is preparing to dig a hole to study the soil at its landing site.
2/16/04 FAR AWAY QUASARS PROBE END OF COSMIC DARK AGES

The most distant known quasars show that some supermassive black holes formed when the universe was merely 6 percent of its current age, or about 700 million years after the big bang.
2/10/04 SPIRIT ROVER ESTABLISHES NEW MARS DRIVING RECORD

The rover Spirit drove into the Martian history books Monday night by making the longest single-day traverse on the Red Planet, eclipsing the mark set by Mars Pathfinder's Sojourner rover in 1997.
2/10/04 REACTOR RESEARCH TO POWER JOURNEY TO JUPITER'S MOONS

A planned U.S. mission to investigate three ice-covered moons of Jupiter will demand fast-paced research, fabrication and realistic non-nuclear testing of a prototype nuclear reactor within two years, says a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist.
2/10/04 MARS EXPRESS SPIES VALLES MARINERIS REGION

This image was acquired by the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter from an altitude of 275 km above the Red Planet. The features in the picture indicate erosional processes possibly caused by water.

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Special Events

Only


Until

This year's
Rockland Astronomy Club's 13th annual
Northeast Astronomy Forum
&
Telescope Show

April 17th & 18th 2004

Check out the Rockland Astronomy Club for details.

SAS members will be traveling once again to NEAF, interested individuals should e-mail Glenn Skinner.

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Reprinted with permission.

 

Deep Space Network 2-for-1 Sale!

By Patrick L. Barry

Call it a "buy one, get one free" sale for astronomers: Build a network of radio dishes for communicating with solar-system probes, get a world-class radio telescope with a resolution nearly as good as a telescope the size of Earth!

That's the incidental bonus that NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) offers the astronomy community. Designed to maintain contact with distant spacecraft in spite of the Earth's rotation, the large, widely spaced dishes of the DSN are ideal for performing a form of radio astronomy called "very long baseline interferometry" (VLBI).

VLBI produces very high resolution images of the cosmos by combining the output from two or more telescopes. The result is like having a giant "virtual" telescope as large as the distance between the real dishes! Since bigger telescopes can produce higher resolution images than smaller ones, astronomers need to use dishes that are as far apart as possible.

That need dovetails nicely with the DSN's design. To maintain continuous contact with deep space missions, the DSN has tracking stations placed in California, Spain, and Australia. These locations are roughly equally spaced around the Earth, each about 120 degrees of longitude from the others-that way at least one dish can always communicate with a probe regardless of Earth's rotation. That also means, though, that the straight-line distance between any two of the stations is roughly 85 percent of Earth's diameter-or about 6,700 miles. That's almost as far apart as land-based telescopes can be.

"We often collaborate with other VLBI groups around the world, combining our dishes with theirs to produce even better images," says Michael J. Klein, manager of the DSN Science Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Since our 70-meter dish in Canberra, Australia, is the largest dish in the southern hemisphere, adding that dish in particular makes a huge difference in the quality of a VLBI observation."

Even though only about 1 percent of the DSN's schedule is typically spared from probe-tracking duty and scheduled for radio astronomy, it manages to make some important contributions to radio astronomy. For example, the DSN is currently helping image the expanding remnant of supernova 1987A, and Dr. Lincoln Greenhill of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is using the DSN dishes to explore a new way to measure the distances and velocities of galaxies.

And all this comes as a "bonus" from the dishes of the DSN. 

To introduce kids to multi-wavelength astronomy, NASA's website for kids, The Space Place, has just added the interactive demo, "Cosmic Colors," at spaceplace.nasa.gov/cosmic .

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

 




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