Solscape

Geoff Anderson describes the history of the telescope, from the very beginning, to today’s space telescopes. He discusses the problems which occurred with the Hubble space telescope. Now there are plans for even bigger instruments. Current telescopes are up to 10 metres in diameter. And there are plans for instruments up to 100 metres in diameter!
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2006/1796819.htm

APOD

A new HiRISE image shows the landing site of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. The prominent impact crater on the right-hand side of the image is “Endurance crater” where Opportunity spent about ten months of its now nearly three-year mission. The bright irregularly-shaped feature in area “a” of the image is Opportunity’s parachute, now lying on the martian surface. Near the parachute is the cone-shaped “backshell” that helped protect Opportunity’s lander during its seven-month journey to Mars. Area “b” of the image shows the impact point and the broken remnants of Opportunity’s heat shield. Area “c” of the image shows “Eagle crater”, the small martian impact crater where Opportunity’s airbag-cushioned lander came to rest. The lander is still clearly visible on the floor of the crater.
Mars Exploration Rover Landing Site at Meridiani Planum

A trio of space telescopes have combined to create a stunning image of the N49 supernova remnant in the Milky Way’s neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Spitzer Space Telescope imaged relatively cool gas toward the outer edge of the remnant in infrared, seen in red. The blue in the centre of the image, taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, indicates extremely hot gas. The Hubble Space Telescope is responsible for the optical view of white and yellow filaments.
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/n49/

The mystery over the purpose of a sophisticated geared “calculator” built in the 2nd century BC has finally been solved. The so-called “Antikythera mechanism” was found in 1902 by sponge divers exploring a shipwreck off the Greek island of the same name, but its exact use had puzzled scientists. The relic consists of numerous fragments, including brass gears embedded in thick mineral encrustations. The device is thought to have once been housed in a wooden box about the size of a carriage clock and is more complex by far than any other machine known to have existed on the planet for the following 1000 years. Now a team led by Mike Edmunds at Cardiff University in Wales has shown that the Antikythera mechanism was designed to predict solar and lunar eclipses from the relative positions of the Earth, Moon and Sun. Edmunds’s team used an industrial CT scanner to map out the gear trains within the mineral-encrusted fragments. The scans allowed them to determine how the components fit together and to work out their function. The team also found fragments of previously hidden text engraved on the metal.
The 2.000-year-old computer

A geologist at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, has come up with evidence our planet practices recycling on a grand scale. Writing in the prestigious British science journal “Nature”, geological sciences professor Claude Herzberg offers new evidence that parts of the Earth’s crust that long ago dove hundreds or thousands of kilometers into the Earth’s interior have resurfaced in the hot lava flow of Hawaiian volcanoes.
http://ur.rutgers.edu/medrel/viewArticle.html?ArticleID=5485

Natur hautnah erleben ist das Motto von “Streaming Planet”, dem ersten Internet-Fernsehsender, der sich ausschließlich dem Thema Natur und Reise widmet. Hier sind insbesondere die Vulkanaufnahmen in der Rubrik “naturwunder erde” sehenswert.
http://www.streaming-planet.de/

Vor ungefähr 8.000 Jahren löste ein gewaltiger Erdrutsch am Ätna auf Sizilien eine Katastrophe im östlichen Mittelmeer aus: eine ganze Flanke des Vulkans sackte damals ins Meer ab und brachte weitere Ablagerungen vor der Küste Siziliens ins Rutschen. Dabei entstand das heutige Valle del Bove, ein hufeisenförmiger Einschnitt an der Ostseite des Vulkans. Der durch den Erdrutsch ausgelöste Tsunami rollte durch das gesamte östliche Mittelmeer und brachte womöglich die Steinzeitmenschen in der Gegend des heutigen Israel dazu, ihre Siedlungen zu verlassen. Das zeigen Modellrechnungen, die Maria Teresa Pareschi vom Nationalen Institut für Geophysik und Vulkanologie in Pisa und ihre Kollegen in der Zeitschrift “Geophysical Research Letters” vorstellen.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL027790.shtml

The New Horizons team got a faint glimpse of the mission’s distant, main planetary target when one of the spacecraft’s telescopic cameras spotted Pluto for the first time:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/112806.php

For the first time, scientists have directly measured the amount of heat flowing from the molten metal of Earth’s core into a region at the base of the mantle, a process that helps drive both the movement of tectonic plates at the surface and the geodynamo in the core that generates Earth’s magnetic field.
http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/press_releases/text.asp?pid=978