Phoenix Will Try New

New motto for the Phoenix spacecraft: If at first you don't succeed, then dust yourself off and try again. Since the Martian soil is proving to be a challenge for the Mars lander, engineers will try a new technique to try delivering the frozen arctic soil into the TEGA, or the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Anaylzer, designed to bake and sniff samples to identify key ingredients in the soil. The soil is clumping together, and won't pass through a screen that brings it to the ovens on board the spacecraft...

Stars Orbiting Close to Black Holes Flattened like Hot Pancakes

Playing with black holes is a risky business, especially for a star that is unlucky enough to be orbiting one. Assuming an unfortunate star hasn't already had all of its hydrogen fuel and other component elements stripped from its surface, the powerful tidal forces will have some fun with the doomed stellar body.

Sirius

 

The star of Isis, called Sothis, or Sirius, is the brightest star

New NASA International Year of Astronomy 2009 Web Site

Join NASA in 2009 as it celebrates the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first observations of the universe through a telescope ...

Astronomy Pictures of the Year for 2007

Looking back over the past year, the editors of the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) have decided to list 12 of the more memorable images posted to APOD in 2007. There was certainly no shortage of breathtaking images to choose from -- with robotic cameras orbiting Mars and rolling around its surface, the Cassini spacecraft at Saturn, space telescopes exploring the cosmos, and ground-based imaging with increasingly sophisticated hardware and software. Therefore, besides choosing our overall favorites, we have tried to diversify the selection to include spectacular pictures from several different categories. Twelve Astronomy Pictures of the Year (APOY) are highlighted below in the order they appeared on APOD. The selection process was, of course, very difficult and in the end more than a little arbitrary. In fact, of these 12 APOYs only one was unanimously selected. Hopefully, you will recognize at least one of your own favorites here!

"Listening" for Gravitational Waves to Track Down Black Holes

Gravitational waves are predicted by Einstein's 1916 general theory of relativity, but they are notoriously hard to detect and it's taken many decades to come close to observing them. Now, with the help of a supercomputer named SUGAR (Syracuse University Gravitational and Relativity Cluster), two years of data collected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) will be analyzed to find gravitational waves.

Building a Map of Dark Energy

Understanding dark energy is probably one of the largest mysteries in cosmology right now. Figure this out, and a Nobel Prize in physics is assured. But it won't give up its secrets so easily. Since they can't measure dark energy directly, astronomers can only measure its effects on the large-scale structures of the Universe, and then tease out some of its characteristics.