Looking Up by Bob Eklund
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Hubble Makes One Millionth Science Observation NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has crossed another milestone in its space odyssey of exploration and discovery. On Monday, July 4, the Earth-orbiting observatory logged its one millionth science observation during a search for water in an exoplanet’s atmosphere 1,000 light-years away. “For 21 years Hubble has been the premier space [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Space Scientists Call for Volunteers to Help Guide Mission to Solar System’s Edge Looking for a cutting-edge science project for your youngster? Here’s one that will help the space effort as well as educate—and it doesn’t require anything but a computer. A team from Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville has developed the website IceHunters: www.icehunters.org which [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Cassini Spacecraft Captures Ocean-Like Spray from Saturn’s Moon-- NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has discovered the best evidence yet for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft’s direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from Enceladus. Data from Cassini’s cosmic dust analyzer show [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Asteroids May Have Brought Us Life’s Ingredients Some asteroids may have been like “molecular factories” cranking out life’s ingredients and shipping them to Earth via meteorite impacts, according to scientists who’ve made discoveries of molecules essential for life in material from certain kinds of asteroids and comets. In January 2000, a large meteoroid exploded in the [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
New Mars Rover to Have 3-D Color Vision; “Highway to the Stars” Opens to Mt. Wilson Two digital color cameras riding high on the mast of NASA’s next Mars rover will complement each other in showing the surface of Mars in exquisite detail. They are the left and right eyes of the Mast Camera, or Mastcam, instrument on the Curiosity rover of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, to [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Science, Truth, Language: Communicating With Non-Science and Public Audiences How many times do we hear that some scientific view is “only theory” or that it is “not proven”? The hidden implication is that if we have not “proven” the case, then we do not know anything for certain about it, and any idea is as good as any other. A recent and vivid example of this problem is the [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Searching for Intelligent Life on 86 Earth-Like Planets Now that NASA’s Kepler space telescope has identified 1,235 possible planets around stars in our galaxy, astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, are aiming a radio telescope at the 86 most Earth-like of these worlds to see if they can detect signals from an advanced civilization. This new UC Berkeley search began on [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Herschel Space Observatory Lives Up to the Family Name -- Astronomy is about scientific discoveries, and every week our scientists bring us new and richer views of the Universe around us. But astronomy is also about history, and about people. The name “Herschel” provides a good example. The Herschel Space Observatory has been observing the sky at infra-red wavelengths since shortly [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Sailing the Titan Seas: NASA Selects Mission to Saturn’s Moon -- The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., is managing a project to explore the organic seas of Saturn’s moon Titan, one of three proposals selected by NASA last week as candidates for the agency’s next Discovery Program mission. The Titan Mare Explorer, or TiME, would perform the first [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Spacecraft Earth to Perform Asteroid ‘Flyby’ this Fall Since the dawn of the space age, humanity has sent 16 robotic emissaries to fly by some of the solar system’s most intriguing and nomadic occupants—comets and asteroids. The data and imagery collected on these deep-space missions of exploration have helped redefine our understanding of how Earth and our part of the galaxy came to [...]
