Solscape

NASA’s MESSENGER made its closest approach to Venus yesterday, coming within 2.990 kilometers of its surface. The spacecraft used this close encounter with Venus’ gravity to alter its trajectory as it travels towards its final destination: Mercury. This won’t be the final encounter with our twin planet, though. MESSENGER will meet up with Venus again in June 2007. It’ll finally make its first encounter with Mercury in January 2008, but won’t be in a final orbit until March 2011.
MESSENGER Completes Venus Flyby

In 1054 A.D., Chinese astronomers recorded the temporary brightening of a star in the constellation Taurus. Nearly 1000 years later, we look into the same region and see the exploded remnants of a dead star: the Crab Nebula. A new composite photograph of the Crab Nebula was made by merging images from Hubble, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. It shows only a hail of high-energy particles and expanding debris cloud that once was a massive star.
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/crab/

Zooming in on a nearby young star called HD 141569A, astronomers using the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, discovered a hole in a disk of gas and dust encircling the star. The existence of this large gap, which is about the size of the orbit of Saturn, supports the theory that this young star ended its infancy abruptly by ionizing and pushing away the gas in the disk from which it was born.
http://subarutelescope.org/Pressrelease/2006/10/23/index.html

Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have recently identified two quasars, or supermassive black holes, that may be on the verge of a colossal cosmic “belch”.
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/happenings/20061024/

Imagine trying to understand how a football game works based on just a few fuzzy snapshots of the game in play. Astronomers have faced this challenge when it comes to understanding the dynamics of the beehive swarm of stars in the globular star clusters that orbit our Milky Way Galaxy. Now, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with the best observational evidence to date that globular clusters sort out stars according to their mass, governed by a gravitational billiard ball game between stars.
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2006/33/full/

NASA’s twin Viking spacecraft may have missed signs of life during their examination of the Martian surface 30 years ago. Researchers now say that the landers’ experiments were not sensitive enough to find life and in any case may not have been able to spot the strange forms that Martian life might take. The results from Vikings’ onboard experiments are confusing because some tests suggested the presence of organisms capable of digesting organic molecules. But heating the soil with a gas-chromatograph mass spectrometer to release these organic molecules found nothing, causing most scientists to rule out life. Now, a paper by Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez of the University of Mexico and others demonstrates that the mass spectrometer onboard Viking was incapable of detecting organic compounds even in Mars-like soils from various locations on Earth. This includes Chile’s Atacama desert, where other tests prove that living microbes are indeed present, and samples taken from Rio Tinto in Spain, which contain iron compounds similar to those detected in Mars soils by the Mars Exploration Rover “Opportunity”.

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A detailed study of sedimentary rocks exposed along a portion of southern California’s San Jacinto fault zone shows the fault to be no older than 1.1 million to 1.3 million years and that its long-term slip rate is probably faster than previously thought. Researchers at three universities conducted a study of the earthquake-active region, funded by the National Science Foundation, concluding that sedimentation related to slip in the San Jacinto fault zone began about 1 million years ago, significantly later than predicted by previous models.
Slip Rate Of Southern California Fault May Be Faster Than Previously Believed

Researcher Dr. Peterson, an expert in geological science and engineering, has discovered a mineral that could explain the mountainous landscape of Mars – and could have implications for NASA’s next mission to the Red Planet. Dr. Peterson suggests that Mars was likely wetter in the past. All of the images that are coming back from the rovers show layering in the rock which is indicative of sediment manipulated by water. This kind of out-wash would require a fair amount of water on the planet at some point. The discovery was made in Dr. Peterson’s unheated garage using epsomite, also known as Epsom salts. The solution was left to crystallize for several days at temperatures below freezing, which formed crystals that have unusual properties. The crystals were then rapidly melted, which created mould-like channels and gullies – similar to what we see on the surface of Mars. This indicates that Martian terrain may have been created in a similar fashion.

Crystal molds on Mars: Melting of a possible new mineral species to create Martian chaotic terrain

As the guitar power in the legendary British rock band Queen, Brian May conquered most of our planet – and now he has his sights set on mastering the universe. The star musician, who wrote hits like “We Will Rock You” and “The Show Must Go On”, has switched from his guitar to a pen and co-authored a book with the two leading British astronomers Sir Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott. “Bang! The Complete History of the Universe” is telling the story of the big bang and how the universe has evolved since. Brian May, 59, earned a degree in physics at Imperial College, London, but after years of studying interplanetary dust, he abandoned work towards his doctorate when Queen, fronted by stellar performer Freddie Mercury, took off.
Source: AFP

http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMINCO7BTE_index_0.html