LEEVENSPARK

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity will spend the next few months during the coldest part of Martian winter at Greeley Haven, an outcrop of rock on Mars recently named informally to honor ASU Regents’ Professor Ronald Greeley, a planetary geologist who died Oct. 27, 2011. Long passionate about exploring the solar system and Mars in particular, Greeley was involved with many missions to the Red Planet, including Mariners 6, 7, and 9, Viking, Mars Pathfinder, Mars Global Surveyor, and the two Mars Exploration Rovers. He was also a co-investigator for the camera system on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter mission. Among his major research interests were wind erosion, dunes and dust devil activity, all of which can be found in abundance on Mars. “We miss Ron’s wisdom and guidance on the rover team,” says Jim Bell, lead scientist for the Panoramic Camera (Pancam) on the rover. Bell, who came to ASU in early 2011, is a professor in the School of Earth and Space Explor

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is an intriguing, alien world that’s covered in a thick atmosphere with abundant methane. With an average surface temperature of a brisk -300 degrees Fahrenheit (about 90 kelvins) and a diameter just less than half of Earth’s, Titan boasts methane clouds and fog, as well as rainstorms and plentiful lakes of liquid methane. It’s the only place in the solar system, other than Earth, that has large bodies of liquid on its surface. The origins of many of these features, however, remain puzzling to scientists. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a computer model of Titan’s atmosphere and methane cycle that, for the first time, explains many of these phenomena in a relatively simple and coherent way. In particular, the new model explains three baffling observations of Titan. One oddity was discovered in 2009, when researchers led by Caltech professor of planetary science Oded Aharonson found that Titan’s methane l

"...when we look at galaxies alone, the gas and stars become relatively more important and begin to influence dark matter..." The interaction of dark matter with stars and gas in individual galaxies is more complicated than previously thought, according to International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). After discovering a correlation between the concentration and mass of dark matter around clusters of galaxies, Dr Alan Duffy from ICRAR found this relationship breaks down around single galaxies, like our own Milky Way. “A basic assumption that astronomers often make is that the dark matter is so dominant that we can ignore the effects of gas and stars on its dynamics. “For massive clusters of galaxies this is a good approximation and there's a nice relation that drops out of the simulations between the mass of the cluster and the dark matter concentration, in full agreement with observations. “The problem is that when we look at galaxies alone, the gas and sta

All planets move around their stars in the same direction as the star spins—at least that’s what we thought. But now ANU astronomer Dr Daniel Bayliss and his colleagues have found a planet that breaks the mould. Dr Bayliss, from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, is one of 16 early-career scientists unveiling their research to the public at Fresh Science – a national program sponsored by the Australian Government. Using one of the world’s largest telescopes in Chile, Daniel and his collaborators discovered that a distant planet WASP-17b is moving in the opposite direction to the spin of the star around which it orbits. The discovery throws traditional theories about how planets form around stars into doubt. "Until now it has been assumed that any planets orbiting a star would be moving in the same direction as the star’s spin." Planets form from the same disk of rotating material that gives birth to the star around which they move. So until now it has bee

"The universe really was filled with a new kind of energy that was causing it to expand at an increasing speed." A survey of more than 200,000 galaxies led by Australian astronomers has shown that ‘dark energy’ is real and not a mistake in Einstein’s theory of gravity. The finding is conveyed in two papers led by Dr Chris Blake from Swinburne University’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, which will be published in the  Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . Using the Anglo-Australian Telescope, 26 astronomers contributed to the ‘WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey’ which mapped the distribution of galaxies over an unprecedented volume of the Universe. Because light takes so long to reach Earth, it was the equivalent of looking seven billion years back in time – more than half way back to the Big Bang. The survey, which took four years to complete, aimed to measure the properties of ‘dark energy’ a concept first cast by Einstein in his original Theory of Gener

Researchers have uncovered a new stellar neighbour with the discovery of the closest young star to Earth. The international team, including Simon Murphy, a final-year PhD student from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, have shown that the star, named AP Columbae, is the closest so-called `pre main-sequence’ star. Their paper has been published this week in The Astronomical Journal. “Pre main-sequence stars are much younger than the Sun. Using telescopes in Coonabarabran, Chile, Hawaii and California we have shown that the faint, red-dwarf star AP Columbae is the closest such star to the Earth,” said Mr Murphy. “For decades it was believed that young stars only resided in vast star-forming regions like the Orion Nebula. These regions are typically several hundred light years away from the Earth. With the advent of accurate, all-sky surveys we can now find young stars much closer to home.” AP Columbae, an otherwise innocuous red-dwarf star in the constellation of Col

A PhD student from The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Perth has produced one of the most accurate measurements ever made of how fast the Universe is expanding. Florian Beutler, a PhD candidate with ICRAR at The University of Western Australia, has calculated how fast the Universe is growing by measuring the Hubble constant. "The Hubble constant is a key number in astronomy because it's used to calculate the size and age of the Universe," said Mr Beutler. As the Universe swells, it carries other galaxies away from ours.  The Hubble constant links how fast galaxies are moving with how far they are from us. By analysing light coming from a distant galaxy, the speed and direction of that galaxy can be easily measured. Determining the galaxy's distance from Earth is much more difficult.  Until now, this has been done by observing the brightness of individual objects within the galaxy and using what we know about the object to calculat

science goes as bad... Whether or not this is actually scientifically possible doesn’t matter. The main idea behind any science fiction just has to be believable within the parameters of the world in which it is set. Indeed, the director of the new  Planet of the Apes  movie, Rupert Wyatt, has said he found the explanation of the original 1960s films – that the apes evolved naturally after being domesticated by humans – unsatisfying. Some people might find it odd to talk about science fiction needing plausible explanations. The clue is there in the name – science  fiction . And there are probably plenty of people who dislike the entire genre because it inevitably includes unrealistic elements. But really it’s an issue that extends to all fiction. As George Bernard Shaw supposedly put it, you are allowed one big lie and everything else must be logical. Perhaps you can even get away with a few lies, but ask too much of the audience and it all becomes too distracting to accept even the b

GIST OF THE STORY ================================================================== A British company is working on a spaceplane that can carry cargo or a pod for passengers to orbit. A critical piece of technology for the spaceplane's engines is currently under development. The spaceplane could ferry cargo and passengers into space more cheaply than current alternatives ============================================================   A British firm is upping the ante in a long-held dream to build an airplane that also can fly in space. With support from the U.K. Space Agency, Reaction Engines is building a prototype of a critical piece of its spaceplane's technology, which will be tested on a conventional jet engine. The ultimate goal is Skylon, an unpiloted, air-breathing vehicle that takes off and lands on a runway, and can travel beyond Earth's atmosphere. Rather than using expensive rocket motors that have to be discarded or refurbished after every flight

Blinding Flashes Leave Astronaut's Eyes Damaged Dark Sky, Bright Sun. Credit: STS-82 Crew, NASA. by Patrick L. Barry for NASA Science News Huntsville AL (SPX) Oct 25, 2004 Gazing out of their space capsules, Apollo astronauts witnessed sights that humans had never before seen. They saw the breathtaking view of the Earth's bright blue disc against the inky black of space. They saw the far side of the Moon. They also saw strange flashes of light inside their eyeballs! Since then, astronauts aboard Skylab, the Shuttle, Mir, and the International Space Station have all reported seeing these flashes. No need to call Agents Mulder and Scully of The X Files, though: what the astronauts are experiencing is space radiation zipping through their eyes like subatomic bullets. When a "bullet" strikes the retina, it triggers a false signal that the brain interprets as a flash of light. Needless to say, this is not good for your eyes. Years after returning to Earth, many

NASA's Kepler telescope has for the first time observed a planetary system with two planets passing in front of their star. The planets, now named named Kepler-9b and 9c, were seen transiting the sun-like star called Kepler-9. The announcement comes just days after ESO released data on a planetary system believed to have five orbiting planets, discovered with the HARP ground-based telescope. Kepler can measure the tiny drop in brightness that occurs when a planet transits a star; the size of the planet can be worked out from the scale of the dips. The time between dips gives the distance of the planet from the star, and variations in their regularity can be used to work out the planets' masses and detect other non-transiting planets in the system.   Kepler found more than 700 possible planets in its first 43 days, and has discovered five more systems that appear to have more than one transiting planet. "Kepler's high quality data and round-the-clock cov