From Lifehacker

Space junkies with an iPhone or iPod touch, listen up: NASA released an app compiling pretty much everything going on in the space program to give you access to images, mission info, countdown clocks, and more, all in one place.

This free app is packed with continually-updated information about NASA's missions, launch calendars, and a boatload of other info related to its space exploration programs. You can follow the agency's Twitter feeds, catch up on blog posts from various departments, watch videos, and even read up on historical moments of the space program.

The NASA App provides up-to-the-minute information on exactly where in orbit the International Space Station (ISS) is, and also the Space Shuttle when it's on a mission. If you allow the app access to your location, it will even tell you when the ISS and Shuttle will pass by overhead. Speaking of the Shuttle, this is a particularly handy app to have around on launch day to get blow-by-blow updates right up to lift off.

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Amateur and professional astronomers now have a new website to report any unexplained phenomena they view in the night sky - including suspect UFOs that might be visiting from afar.

An Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (UAP) Observations Reporting Scheme has been set up within the framework of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009).

Philippe Ailleris, an amateur astronomer is proposing to use the IYA2009's network of professional and amateur astronomers to collect additional and more rigorous information on UAPs.

The website provides detailed information on common nocturnal and daytime misidentifications, such as sightings of satellites, weather balloons, rockets and natural phenomena such as meteors, planets, ball lightning, sprites and mirages.

"Many professional and amateur astronomers are scanning the skies with all kinds of technical equipment -- telescopes, binoculars, video-cameras, cameras with spectrographs -- which creates an excellent opportunity to obtain supplementary data related to UAP sightings," Ailleris explains in a press statement.

Ailleris said that his hope is to use this opportunity "to enthuse young and not so young people and prompt them to start looking upwards and outwards to make sense of their place in the Universe."

Check out the UAP Observations Reporting Scheme website:

http://www.uapreporting.org

By LD/CSE

From Universe Today

The new infrared southern sky survey telescope VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) right here on Earth has gone online and released its first few gorgeous pictures.

This first one is of the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024), a star-forming region in the constellation Orion. The bright star in the image is the blue supergiant Alnitak, which is the easternmost star in Orion's belt. Also shown is the reflected glow of NGC 2023 just below center, and the outline of the Horsehead Nebula in the far lower right (it looks a little different than you might normally see it because VISTA is operating in the visible and near-infrared). This image is about half the area of the full VISTA field of view, and is measures about 40 x 50 arcminutes - that's about half a square degree on the sky , or twice the area of the full Moon.

The VISTA telescope is operated by the European Southern Observatory, and is part of their Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile. It's sitting just one peak over from the Very Large Telescope, also operated by the ESO. The main mirror on VISTA is a whopping 4.1 meters across (13.5 feet), and has 16 different detectors and a 3-ton camera for a total output of 67 million pixels. This allows for some very detailed images.

Since it's a near-infrared telescope, it detects heat, and would detect its own heat signature, so the camera is housed in a cooler that keeps it at a chilly -200 degrees Celsius (-328 degrees Fahrenheit), and it's sealed with the largest infrared-transparent window ever made. VISTA is charged with surveying the southern sky in the visible and near-infrared, and it will do so at a sensitivity that is forty times that of other infrared sky surveys, such as the Two Micron All-Sky Survey. It will be taking in enormous amounts of data to be processed: 300 gigabytes each night, or more than 100 terabytes per year.

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From MSNBC

Scientists are on their way to discovering thousands of new planets, potentially including hundreds of worlds the size of Earth, in Earth-like orbits around sunlike stars. They expect to achieve that goal within three years or so. But they'll start with the weirdest worlds.

The most advanced planet-hunting probes - the European Space Agency's COROT satellite and NASA's Kepler spacecraft - are designed to spot close-in planets most easily. That means the first revelations will be about planets in orbits much smaller than Mercury's.

So when Kepler's scientists announce their first official results next month, expect to hear about "hot Jupiters" and "super-Earths" whirling so close to their stars that they sizzle. And you just might hear about phenomena so strange that the scientists can hardly believe their instruments.
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"I was not prescient enough to anticipate something that we're seeing," David Latham, a mission co-investigator from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told msnbc.com. "There are some good things coming."

Kepler's principal investigator, William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center, expects that his science team will present about 30 papers at next month's American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington.

"We have planets to announce, and we will have planets to announce next year - quite a few more, in fact," he said.

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From Universe Today

The handle of the Big Dipper just got stronger! Astronomers have found an additional star located in the Dipper's gripper that is invisible to the unaided eye. Alcor, one of the stars that makes the bend in the Big Dipper's handle has a smaller red dwarf companion orbiting it. Now known as "Alcor B," the star was found with an innovative technique called "common parallactic motion," and was found by members of Project 1640, an international collaborative team that gives a nod to the insight of Galileo Gallilei.

"We used a brand new technique for determining that an object orbits a nearby star, a technique that's a nice nod to Galileo," says Ben R. Oppenheimer, Curator at the Museum of Natural History. "Galileo showed tremendous foresight. Four hundred years ago, he realized that if Copernicus was right-that the Earth orbits the Sun-they could show it by observing the 'parallactic motion' of the nearest stars. Incredibly, Galileo tried to use Alcor to see it but didn't have the necessary precision."

If Galileo had been able to see change over time in Alcor's position, he would have had conclusive evidence that Copernicus was right. Parallactic motion is the way nearby stars appear to move in an annual, repeatable pattern relative to much more distant stars, simply because the observer on Earth is circling the Sun and sees these stars from different places over the year.

The collaborative team that found the star includes astronomers from the American Museum of Natural History, the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, the California Institute of Technology, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Alcor is a relatively young star twice the mass of the Sun. Stars this massive are relatively rare, short-lived, and bright. Alcor and its cousins in the Big Dipper formed from the same cloud of matter about 500 million years ago, something unusual for a constellation since most of these patterns in the sky are composed of unrelated stars. Alcor shares a position in the Big Dipper with another star, Mizar. In fact, both stars were used as a common test of eyesight-being able to distinguish "the rider from the horse"-among ancient people. One of Galileo's colleagues observed that Mizar itself is actually a double, the first binary star system resolved by a telescope. Many years later, the two components Mizar A and B were themselves determined each to be tightly orbiting binaries, altogether forming a quadruple system.

In March, members of Project 1640 attached their coronagraph and adaptive optics to the 200-inch Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California and pointed to Alcor. "Right away I spotted a faint point of light next to the star," says Neil Zimmerman, a graduate student at Columbia University who is doing his PhD dissertation at the Museum. "No one had reported this object before, and it was very close to Alcor, so we realized it was probably an unknown companion star."

The team retuned a few months later and found the star had the same motion as Alcor, proving it was a companion star.

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From NASA

Make hot cocoa. Bundle up. Tell your friends. The best meteor shower of 2009 is about to fall over North America on a long, cold December night.

"It's the Geminid meteor shower," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "and it will peak on Dec. 13th and 14th under ideal viewing conditions."

A new Moon will keep skies dark for a display that Cooke and others say could top 140 meteors per hour. According to the International Meteor Organization, maximum activity should occur around 12:10 a.m. EST (0510 UT) on Dec. 14th. The peak is broad, however, and the night sky will be rich with Geminids for many hours and perhaps even days around the maximum

Cooke offers this advice: "Watch the sky during the hours around local midnight. For North Americans, this means Sunday night to Monday morning."

Researchers are interested to see what the Geminids do in 2009. The shower has been intensifying in recent decades and they wonder if the trend will continue.

Geminids are pieces of debris from a strange object called 3200 Phaethon. Long thought to be an asteroid, Phaethon is now classified as an extinct comet. It is, basically, the rocky skeleton of a comet that lost its ice after too many close encounters with the sun. Earth runs into a stream of debris from 3200 Phaethon every year in mid-December, causing meteors to fly from the constellation Gemini: sky map.

When the Geminids first appeared in the late 19th century, shortly before the US Civil War, the shower was weak and attracted little attention. There was no hint that it would ever become a major display.

But now it has. "The Geminids are strong-and getting stronger," says Cooke, who has prepared a plot showing how the shower has intensified since its discovery:

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From Wired.com

Four hundred years after Galileo's telescope revolutionized humanity's view of the universe, a gigantic telescope is in the works that could take us to a new, deeper level of understanding.

The enormous Thirty Meter Telescope, with a primary mirror the size of a blue whale, is part of a new generation of super powerful ground-based telescopes. Scheduled for completion in 2018, it will have nine times the collecting power of the Keck telescopes and 12 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. From its recently selected location atop the volcanic dome of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the pioneering telescope will provide an extremely detailed look at the universe.

"As we learn more, the cosmos become more mysterious and require more human ingenuity to get to the next step," Jerry Nelson, UC Santa Cruz physicist and TMT project scientist, said at a public talk Thursday.

Once finished, the new telescope will allow astronomers to see faint objects clearer than ever before. It will be able to focus on and indentify extremely distant structures that currently appear as blurry smudges in the Hubble Deep Field. As yet, no one knows what these objects are.

This new resolution will provide insights into the both dark matter and dark energy. And it will widen the search for planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. For the first time, we will be able to routinely image direct light from these exoplanets, garnering information on their atmospheric chemistry and dynamics.

The new TMT will also be able to see further back in time than any previous telescope, all the way back to the formation of the first stars and galaxies that followed the universe's "Dark Ages."

An adaptive optics system will aid the telescope's ability to see into deep space. Atmospheric turbulence usually distorts light coming from distant stars. So the adaptive optics system uses a sodium laser to probe current conditions, and information about the turbulence is fed into a small deformable mirror, which makes real-time corrections to the atmosphere's quivering. The effect is sort of like putting glasses on to correct for blurred vision - the end result is a much crisper image.

Without adaptive optics, ground-based astronomy couldn't compete with space-based projects such as Hubble. The system is considered so vital that Nelson refers to it as the "heart and soul of the mirror and telescope."

Nelson has been called the father of the modern telescope, because it was his innovative design in the 1970s that allowed for the creation of big telescopes like the 10-meter Keck. His segmented mirrors have completely transformed the field of astronomy, leading UC Santa Cruz astronomer Sandy Faber to call him a modern day Galileo.

Previously, telescope mirrors larger than 5 meters were considered unfeasible because of many problems: They were hard to cast, their supports were delicate and breakable, and they would warp under their own weight.

Nelson realized that segmenting the main mirror into separate hexagonal pieces could solve all these problems. His design positioned the individual mirrors in a honeycomb-like arrangement and used an intricate computer guidance system to make them act as one, larger unit.

The first telescope to take advantage of this new plan was Keck, which has main mirrors composed of 36 individual pieces. The reflector on the Thirty Meter Telescope will be an order of magnitude leap above this with 492 small mirrors.

Telescopes have doubled in size every 30 years over the last century, and in the not-too-distant future, Nelson predicts we will see 50- and even 100-meter telescopes.

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From MSNBC

When people hear about an impending meteor shower, their first impression may be of a sky filled with shooting stars pouring down through the sky like rain. Such meteor storms have actually occurred with the annual Leonid meteor shower of November, such as in 1833 and 1966, when meteor rates of literally tens of thousands per hour were observed.

In more recent years, most notably 1999, 2001 and 2002, lesser Leonid displays of up to a few thousand meteors per hour thrilled skywatchers.

This year will not set any records, but the Leonids - set to peak early Tuesday morning, Nov. 17 - should offer a better-than-average display.

The Leonid meteors are debris shed into space by Comet Tempel-Tuttle, which swings through the inner solar system at intervals of 33.25 years, looping around the sun then heading back into the outskirts of the solar system. During each visit the comet leaves behind a trail of dust in its wake.

Plenty of the comet's old dusty trails litter the mid-November part of Earth's orbit, and the Earth glides through this debris zone every year. But predicting exactly what's out there is tricky.

On special occasions we'll pass directly through an unusually concentrated dust trail, or filament, which can spark a meteor storm resulting in thousands of meteors per hour. That indeed is what transpired in 1999, 2001 and 2002. Since Comet Tempel-Tuttle comet passed near the sun (and in doing so crossed Earth's orbit) in 1998, it was in those years immediately following its passage that the Leonids put on their best show.

But the comet has since receded out to a distance of 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) from the sun, taking most of those dense filaments of dust with it. That's why this year, during the predawn hours of Nov. 17, when the Leonids traditionally should be at their most numerous, we now expect to see no more than 10 meteors per hour, even with the promise of this year's excellent viewing conditions thanks to a new moon.

Still, for some parts of the world, a far more prolific Leonid show could be in the offing this year. For although Comet Tempel-Tuttle is now far removed from the inner solar system, independent studies by several noted meteor scientists suggest that Earth will pass through several notable trails of meteor activity in 2009. We list these encounters below in chronological order, including the prime regions of visibility.

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From Wired.com

Astronomers have identified an easy-to-measure chemical fingerprint for determining which sunlike stars are likely to host planets. The marker - a low abundance of lithium in the atmosphere of these stars - could prove an invaluable guide for planet hunters trying to determine which of the myriad sunlike stars to select for long-term study.

In their study, Garik Israelian of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain, and his colleagues relied on data from a census of 133 sunlike stars, most of them monitored for several years with the European Southern Observatory's HARPS spectrograph at the La Silla observatory in Chile. Tiny wobbles in the motions of 30 of these stars indicate the gravitational tug of unseen planets.

In the Nov. 12 Nature, Israelian and his colleagues report that the majority of sunlike stars hosting planets in the HARPS sample have, on average, one-tenth the amount of lithium of those without planets. It's been known for decades that Earth's sun shows such a depletion.

"Those sunlike stars with low lithium will have a higher chance to bear planets," Israelian says.

One explanation for the lithium finding, he notes, is related to a star's rotational history. According to a leading theory, stars born with a swirling disk of dust and gas - the disk from which planets coalesce - tend to rotate more slowly than stars born without such disks. The planets that form out of the disk retain some of the rotational energy that the star would otherwise have. The slower a star's rotation, the easier it is for lithium at the top of a star's atmosphere to mix into deeper, hotter layers, where it burns up.

"There is a good case to make that the rotation of the parent star is influenced by whether planets form around it or not," says astronomer Marc Pinsonneault of Ohio State University in Columbus, who wrote a commentary accompanying the report in Nature. "The bottom line is that planets aren't just debris left over from star formation," he says. "Planet formation changes the basic properties of the star that they orbit."

The link between low lithium abundance and planets holds true only for sunlike stars, says Israelian. Cooler, lower-mass stars destroy most of their lithium early on, during their first 10 million to 100 million years of life. Stars more massive than the sun and with temperatures some 200 kelvins warmer can't mix as much lithium into deeper layers, making it difficult to destroy the element.

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From Universe Today

High school students from Germany have now done what many scientists strive for: had their research work published by a science journal. The Astronomy & Astrophysics science journal published a paper co-authored by three students who observed the light variations of the faint (19th magnitude) cataclysmic variable EK Ursae Majoris (EK UMa) over two months. Led by astronomer Klaus Beuermann from the University of Göttingen, and the students' high school physics teacher, the team made use of a remotely-controlled 1.2-meter telescope in Texas. Astronomy & Astrophysics says the team "presents an accurate, long-term ephemeris," and that "they participated in all the steps of a real research program, from initial observations to the publication process, and the result they obtained bears scientific significance."

The students, Joshua Zachmann, Alexander-Maria Ploch, Sang Paik and their teacher, Jens Diese, made observations, analyzed the CCD images, produced and interpreted light curves, and looked at archival satellite data. Beuermann, the astronomer they worked with said, "Although it is fun to perform one's own remote observations with a professional telescope from the comfort of a normal school classroom, it is even more satisfying to be involved in a project that provides new and publishable results rather than to perform experiments with predictable outcomes."

Cataclysmic variable research is a field where the contributions of small telescopes has a long tradition. Cataclysmic variables are extremely close binary systems containing a low-mass star whose material is being stripped off by the gravitational pull of a white dwarf companion. Due to the transfer of matter between the stars, these systems vary dramatically in brightness on timescales in the whole range between seconds and years. This largely unpredictable variability makes them ideal targets for school projects, particularly since professional observatories are generally unable to provide enough observation time for regular monitoring.

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From Wired

Astronomers have for the first time traced gamma rays, the most energetic form of light, to galaxies undergoing a frenzy of star birth. The finding, which has revealed a new class of galactic gamma-ray sources, is not unexpected. But it provides new hints about the origin of many cosmic rays, the high-speed protons and other charged particles of extraordinarily high energies that bombard Earth.

According to the prevailing theory, cosmic rays are accelerated to energies of billions to trillions of electron volts by the expanding shock waves generated when massive stars explode as supernovas. (Cosmic rays with even higher energies are thought to be powered by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.) Kinks in a galaxy's magnetic field keep the particles, mainly protons and other charged particles, bouncing back and forth like ping-pong balls between the advancing shock wave and the region just in front of it, revving up the particles to these high energies, the model suggests.

Massive stars live for only a few million years before exploding - an eyeblink in astronomical terms. Galaxies that produce lots of newborn stars therefore have lots of dying stars that explode as supernovas and ought to have an abundance of cosmic rays.

Testing the theory that supernova shock waves generate cosmic rays hasn't been easy, however, because galactic magnetic fields bend the direction of travel of all charged particles, including cosmic rays, preventing astronomers from tracing any but the highest energy particles - which can escape the magnetic fields - back to their home galaxies.

But when cosmic rays collide with other atomic nuclei in surrounding gas or dust, they produce gamma rays, the most energetic form of light. And unlike charged particles, light can't be bent by magnetic fields.

A new generation of gamma-ray telescopes, including the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope launched in 2008, and VERITAS, an array of four 12-meter telescopes atop Mount Hopkins in Arizona, has now succeeded in detecting gamma rays from three galaxies undergoing intense waves of starbirth. The finding helps to confirm the connection between supernovas and cosmic rays.

Researchers reported the findings November 2 at the 2009 Fermi Symposium (named for the Fermi Gamma-ray telescope, the main focus of the conference). VERITAS observed gamma rays ranging from 700 billion eV to several trillion eV from the galaxy M82, which is some 12 million light-years from Earth. M82 is classified as a starburst galaxy because within a small, central region it makes stars at a rate 10 times higher than that of the entire Milky Way.

Although M82 is one of the closest starburst galaxies, "it took us two years of all-out observations of M82 to acquire all the necessary data," said VERITAS researcher Wystan Benbowof the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. Starburst galaxies produce a diffuse gamma-ray glow that is about one-millionth the brightness of galaxies that have active, supermassive black holes at their centers - the only type of galaxy from which gamma-ray telescopes had previously recorded emissions.

Finding gamma rays in a starburst galaxy "had been long predicted, but nobody had ever done it before this year," noted Benbow, whose team also reported the discovery online November 1 in Nature.

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From Discovery News

Astronomers have found 32 new planets outside our solar system, adding evidence to the theory that the universe has many places where life could develop.

Scientists using European Southern Observatory telescopes didn't find any planets quite the size of Earth or any that seemed habitable or even unusual. But their announcement increased the number of planets discovered outside the solar system to more than 400.

Six of the newly found planets are several times bigger than Earth, increasing the population of so-called SuperEarths by more than 30 percent. Most planets discovered so far are far bigger, Jupiter-sized or even larger.

Two of the newly discovered planets were as small as five times the size of Earth and one was up to five times larger than Jupiter.

Astronomer Stephane Udry of the University of Geneva said the results support the theory that planet-formation is common, especially with certain type of common stars.

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Stand by for yet another "significant discovery" in the field of exoplanets.

That's the word that will come out next week from an international gathering of exoplanet experts during a conference in Porto, Portugal.

The new finding makes use of the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher.

Called HARPS for short, this device is a spectrograph for use with ESO's 3.6-meter telescope.

The noteworthy revelation is to be announced on Monday, October 19.

Detailing the finding will be Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, Xavier Bonfils of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Grenoble in France, as well as Nuno Santos of the University of Porto, Portugal.

Next week's conference of exoplanet researchers is headlined as Towards Other Earths.

Experts at the meeting are discussing new generation instruments and telescopes now being conceived and built by different teams around the world to allow the discovery of other Earths, such as use of the European Extremely Large Telescope.

By Leonard David

From Universe Today

A high-school student from West Virginia has discovered a new astronomical object, a strange type of neutron star called a rotating radio transient. Lucas Bolyard, a sophomore at South Harrison High School in Clarksburg, WV, made the discovery while participating in a project in which students are trained to search through data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). Bolyard made the discovery in March, after he already had studied more than 2,000 data plots from the GBT and found nothing.

The project is the Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC), which allows students to do real scientific research by looking at data from the GBT, the largest radio telescope in the US.

"Lucas is one of the most enthusiastic students involved in the project," said Duncan Lorimer, astronomer from West Virginia University. "He's one of these youngsters that never gives up, he's very persistent and he has all the attributes that a scientist should have."

Rotating radio transients are thought to be similar to pulsars, superdense neutron stars that are the corpses of massive stars that exploded as supernovae. Pulsars are known for their lighthouse-like beams of radio waves that sweep through space as the neutron star rotates, creating a pulse as the beam sweeps by a radio telescope. While pulsars emit these radio waves continuously, rotating radio transients emit only sporadically, one burst at a time, with as much as several hours between bursts. Because of this, they are difficult to discover and observe, with the first one only discovered in 2006.

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A total of 25,880 text messages will be broadcast into space, transmitted 20.3 light-years to Gliese 581d. That world is the outlying planet in the Gliese 581 system, and orbits its parent star every 66.8 days. It may be covered by a large and deep ocean and is the first serious "waterworld" candidate discovered beyond our Solar System.

The effort was carried out as by the Australian magazine, Cosmos, to celebrate Australia's National Science Week and the International Year of Astronomy. The initiative was done with the support of NASA, Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), and the Australia's Science Minister Kim Carr.

In total, messages from Afghanistan to Alaska, from Morocco to Macau - in fact, from all 195 nations and even non-nations like Antarctica and Vatican City, are to be shot into space, noted Wilson da Silva, editor-in-chief of Cosmos magazine.

This form of "radio waving" to another world will take place on Friday from the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla in Australia.

The 70-meter dish will transmit the messages, encoded into binary. The broadcast will take two hours. The messages will be sent at 7.145 Gigahertz at 18 kilowatts in the direction of Gliese 581d, the exoplanet that was only recently discovered to be in its star's habitable zone.

The signal is equivalent to using the combined transmission power of 300 billion mobile phones.

NASA engineers will aim the big dish at azimuth 87 degrees at an elevation of 17 degrees.

That's the location of Gliese 581 when the messages will arrive in that location...around December 2029.

To monitor this dispatch to the target planet, go to:

http://www.hellofromearth.net/

By Leonard David

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has arrived at its last stop on Earth...Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

It arrived safely at the launch site, trucked there from Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation Boulder, Colorado, the builder of the scientific spacecraft.

The probe's telescope and science instrument were built by Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah.

WISE is slated to rocket into space atop a Delta 2 booster this coming December, built to scan the entire sky at infrared wavelengths, unveiling hundreds of thousands of asteroids, and hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies.

After a one-month checkout period in Earth orbit, WISE will map the whole sky over a period of six months.

Onboard frozen hydrogen, which will cool the telescope's infrared detectors, is expected to last several months longer, allowing WISE to map much of the sky a second time and see what has changed.

More information is online at:

http://wise.astro.ucla.edu

For educators, go to a special page at:

http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/education.html

By Leonard David

In a salute to National Science Week, Australians are sending text-like messages to potential intelligent life beyond Earth.

The initiative was launched today and until August 24 you can add your goodwill message that will be transmitted to the nearest Earth-like planet outside our Solar System likely to support life.

The planet – Gliese 581d – is eight times the size of Earth and some 20 light years away. It was first discovered in April 2007. Due to its size, it is classified as a “Super Earth”.

Messages sent during the 2009 National Science Week will arrive in the planet’s vicinity by around December 2029.

Australian Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, entered the first message at the launch of National Science Week at Questacon in Canberra, which read:

“Hello from Australia on the planet we call Earth. These messages express our people’s dreams for the future. We want to share those dreams with you.”

That message was followed by another participant: “You are cordially invited to an Interplanetary BBQ. 6.00pm, 4th October, 2452 at my place BYO Meat and Beer. RSVP”.

Messages can be no longer than 160 characters and will be transmitted from the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla, with the close cooperation of NASA.

The Hello From Earth site is a National Science Week initiative of the popular Australian science magazine, COSMOS, and has been developed with the support of Questacon, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, NASA, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Post-Detection Committee of the International Academy of Astronautics.

To add your text message to be sent to another world, go to:

www.HelloFromEarth.net

By Leonard David

From NASA

Earth is entering a stream of dusty debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle, the source of the annual Perseid meteor shower. Although the shower won't peak until August 11th and 12th, the show is already getting underway.

Brian Emfinger of Ozark, Arkansas, photographed this early Perseid just after midnight on Sunday, July 26th:

"I used an off-the-shelf digital camera to capture this fireball and its smoky trail," says Emfinger. "It was a bright one!"

Don't get too excited, cautions Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "We're just in the outskirts of the debris stream now. If you go out at night and stare at the sky, you'll probably only see a few Perseids per hour."

This will change, however, as August unfolds.

"Earth passes through the densest part of the debris stream sometime on August 12th. Then, you could see dozens of meteors per hour."

For sky watchers in North America, the watch begins after nightfall on August 11th and continues until sunrise on the 12th. Veteran observers suggest the following strategy: Unfold a blanket on a flat patch of ground. (Note: The middle of your street is not a good choice.) Lie down and look up. Perseids can appear in any part of the sky, their tails all pointing back to the shower's radiant in the constellation Perseus. Get away from city lights if you can.

There is one light you cannot escape on August 12th. The 55% gibbous Moon will glare down from the constellation Aries just next door to the shower's radiant in Perseus. The Moon is beautiful, but don't stare at it. Bright moonlight ruins night vision and it will wipe out any faint Perseids in that part of the sky.

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From Wired

Hawaii beat out Chile to become the site of the Thirty-Meter Telescope, which is scheduled to be completed in 2018.

The giant telescope will have a single primary mirror that measures 30 meters across and is made up of 492 segments, giving it nine times more collecting surface than the the biggest telescopes on Earth today.

The Thirty-Meter Telescope will surpass even the Hubble Space Telescope in some ways, giving scientists a new view of some of the oldest stars and galaxies in the universe, as well as planets orbiting nearby stars.

Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the site of the Keck and Subaru telescopes, was among five candidate sites selected based on a global satellite assessment of atmosphere and climate variables. After further studies, Hawaii and Cerro Amazones in Chile rose to the top of the list.

"In the final analysis, the board selected Mauna Kea as the site for TMT," Edward Stone, Caltech physicist and vice chairman of the TMT board, said in a press release Tuesday. "The atmospheric conditions, low average temperatures, and very low humidity will open an exciting new discovery space using adaptive optics and infrared observations."

The project still needs to be approved by the the state and $100 million still needs to be raised for construction. The rest of the $300 million estimated cost will come from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The telescope project is the joint venture of Caltech, the University of California and a group of Canadian Universities called ACURA.

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From Universe Today

Want to know when to stop tweeting and look heavenward for a view of the International Space Station? Follow one more account, then.

Several websites carry information about the space station's path through the sky, but until now there's been no service to alert people when the station is near them.

Dutch journalists Govert Schilling and Jaap Meijers have built a Twitter page to let people know when to look up.

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From Skymania News

Astronomers believe they may have discovered the first planet ever detected in another galaxy. The new world was apparently glimpsed in the closest giant spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, Messier 31 in the constellation of Andromeda.

It lies an incredible 2.5 million light-years away - too far normally to be seen.

But it revealed itself thanks to a phenomenon called microlensing where the gravitational field of an object closer to Earth acts like a magnifying glass.

Amazingly, it has taken the astronomers five years to realise that they probably netted an extra-galactic planet. They observed a peculiar microlensing event while studying the Andromeda galaxy - which can be seen as a dim blur with the unaided eye - in 2004.

The international team, using the UK's Isaac Newton Telescope on the Canary Island of La Palma, thought at the time that they had recorded a pair of stars orbiting each other.

But computer simulations and other calculations have persuaded them that they actually observed a star with a smaller, planet sized companion about six times bigger than Jupiter.

More than 300 so-called exoplanets have been found orbiting other stars in our own galaxy. And NASA has launched a $595 million spaceprobe called Kepler to watch 100,000 stars for signs of world like Earth.

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From Harvard-Smithsonian

In November 2008, Caroline Moore, a 14-year-old student from upstate New York, discovered a supernova in a nearby galaxy, making her the youngest person ever to do so. Additional observations determined that the object, called SN 2008ha, is a new type of stellar explosion, 1000 times more powerful than a nova but 1000 times less powerful than a supernova. Astronomers say that it may be the weakest supernova ever seen.

Even though this explosion was a weakling compared to most supernovae, for a short time SN 2008ha was 25 million times brighter than the sun. However, since it is 70 million light years away, it appeared very faint viewed from Earth.

The peculiar object effectively bridged the gap between a nova (a nuclear explosion on the surface of an old, compact star called a white dwarf) and a type Ia supernova (the destructive death of a white dwarf caused by a runaway nuclear reaction starting deep in the star). SN 2008ha likely was a failed supernova where the explosion was unable to destroy the entire star.

"If a normal supernova is a nuclear bomb, then SN 2008ha is a bunker buster," said team leader Ryan Foley, Clay fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and first author on the paper reporting the findings. "From one perspective, this supernova was an underachiever, however you still wouldn't want be anywhere near the star when it exploded."

Caroline was able to discover the object using a relatively small telescope, but some of the most advanced telescopes in the world were needed to determine the nature of the explosion. Data came from the Magellan telescopes in Chile, the MMT telescope in Arizona, the Gemini and Keck telescopes in Hawaii, and NASA's Swift satellite.

In typical supernova explosions, light from different chemical elements (such as calcium or iron) is smeared out across the electromagnetic spectrum by the Doppler effect (the same principle that makes a police siren change pitch as it passes). Because the ejected bits of the star were "only" moving at 4.5 million miles per hour (compared to 22 million miles per hour for a typical supernova), the light wasn't as smeared out, allowing the team to analyze the composition of the explosion to a new precision.

"You can imagine many ways for a star to explode that might resemble SN 2008ha," said Robert Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "It could have been a massive star suddenly collapsing to form a black hole, with very little energy leaking out. But it looks a lot like its brighter cousins, which we think are nuclear explosion of white dwarfs. Maybe this one was an explosion of that general type, just much, much weaker."

One reason astronomers haven't seen this type of explosion before might be because they are so faint. "SN 2008ha was a really wimpy explosion," said Alex Filippenko, leader of the University of California, Berkeley supernova group, which monitors thousands of relatively nearby galaxies with a robotic telescope at Lick Observatory in California. But a new generation of telescopes and instruments is beginning to search greater distances than ever before, effectively monitoring millions of galaxies. Foley's team concludes that hundreds of this type of event may be spotted in the next few years.

"Coincidentally, the youngest person to ever discover a supernova found one of the most peculiar and interesting supernovae ever," remarked Filippenko. "This shows that no matter what your age, anyone can make a significant contribution to our understanding of the Universe."

The paper has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal and is available online at http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.2794.

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From NASA

Just when you thought it was safe to check your email...

For the sixth year in a row, a message about the Red Planet is popping up in email boxes around the world. It instructs readers to go outside after dark on August 27th and behold the sky. "Mars will look as large as the full moon," it says. "No one alive today will ever see this again."

Don't believe it.

Here's what will really happen if you go outside after dark on August 27th. Nothing. Mars won't be there. On that date, the red planet will be nearly 250 million km away from Earth and completely absent from the evening sky.

The Mars Hoax got its start in 2003 when Earth and Mars really did have a close encounter. On Aug. 27th of that year, Mars was only 56 million km away, a 60,000-year record for martian close approaches to Earth. Someone sent an email alerting friends to the event. The message contained some misunderstandings and omissions-but what email doesn't? A piece of advanced technology called the "forward button" did the rest.

Tolerant readers may say that the Mars Hoax is not really a hoax, because it is not an intentional trick. The composer probably believed everything he or she wrote in the message. If that's true, a better name might be the "Mars Misunderstanding" or maybe the "Confusing-Email-About-Mars-You-Should-Delete-and-Not-Forward-to-Anyone-Except-Your-In-Laws."

Another aspect of the Mars Hoax: It says Mars will look as large as the full Moon if you magnify it 75x using a backyard telescope. The italicized text is usually omitted from verbal and written summaries of the Hoax. (For example, see the beginning of this story.) Does this fine print make the Mars Hoax true? After all, if you magnify the tiny disk of Mars 75x, it does subtend an angle about the same as the Moon.

No. Even with magnification, Mars does not look the same as a full Moon.

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From AP/CBS

The Atlantis astronauts' wake-up call - "God of Wonders" - marked the beginning of a tricky new workday in space, where astronauts aboard the space shuttle Atlantis are about to tackle NASA's No. 1 priority in fixing the Hubble Space Telescope.

Atlantis astronauts Mike Massimino and Mike Good on Friday morning will try to install six new gyroscopes. The instruments are crucial because they help the telescope point in the right direction to take its amazing pictures of the universe.

NASA managers listed replacing the gyros as their top priority because three are broken.

The two astronauts floated out of shuttle Atlantis at 8:49 a.m. ET on a spacewalk that is expected to last about six and a half hours.

Replacing the gyro packages requires an astronaut to float inside the telescope, within inches of delicate equipment that could be damaged by an inadvertent movement.

Massimino and Good will also begin replacing battery modules on the telescope.

CBS News space consultant Bill Harwood reports that the telescope's aging nickel-hydrogen batteries now operate at half their original capacity.

"They were built a couple of years before we launched in '90," said Hubble Program Manager Preston Burch. "We're so far beyond the design lifetime it's anybody's guess as to how long they could continue to go. We know it's not infinite. So our best judgment is we should go ahead and still change them out."

Also this morning, astronaut Megan McArthur is using the shuttle's robotic arm to complete an imaging survey, inspecting some tiles on the craft's underbelly that were missed previously.

NASA sweated a few bullets during yesterday's spacewalk, but was very pleased with the results. Astronauts on Thursday swapped out a nearly 16-year-old camera for a new one the size of a baby grand piano.

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