March 2016 – Page 6 – Astronomy Now

Cassini sees tilted terminator of Saturn’s moon Enceladus

14 March 2016 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured this view of Saturn’s moon Enceladus that shows wrinkled plains that are remarkably youthful in appearance, being generally free of large impact craters.

Video: ExoMars mission blasts off on Proton rocket

14 March 2016 Stephen Clark

A massive spacecraft bound for Mars lifted off on a Russian Proton rocket Monday, riding more than 2 million pounds of thrust from the launcher’s six main engines through low clouds hanging over the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Disco lights from a galaxy cluster seen with multi-spectral eyes

14 March 2016 Astronomy Now

MACS J0717, some 5.4 billion light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Auriga (The Charioteer), is the result of four galaxy clusters colliding. This image is a combination of observations in visible light, X-rays and radio waves from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the NRAO Jansky Very Large Array.

Live coverage: Europe’s Mars mission launches

14 March 2016 Stephen Clark

A powerful Proton booster launched at 0931:42 GMT Monday with the first part of a multibillion-dollar Mars mission led by the European Space Agency. The Mars orbiter and lander will search for signs of methane on the red planet, and demonstrate technologies to be used on a future European Mars rover.

Ambitious European-led Mars mission ready for liftoff

13 March 2016 Stephen Clark

Humankind’s largest emissary to Mars in a generation is set for blastoff in Monday, when Europe and Russia will dispatch a mission to unravel the mystery of Martian methane.

See Mars escape the claw of the Scorpion on 16 March

13 March 2016 Ade Ashford

Now just ten weeks from opposition, Mars is growing in both apparent size and brightness in the pre-dawn sky as the distance between our two worlds decreases. On the morning of Wednesday, 16 March, around the onset of UK nautical twilight, the Red Planet passes just 0.15 degrees from double star Graffias in the constellation Scorpius.

Proton rocket reaches launch pad with Mars probe

12 March 2016 Stephen Clark

A Russian Proton rocket rolled out to its launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday, riding a specially-built rail car with Europe’s ExoMars mission bound for the red planet.

Explore Scientific 2″ Push-fit dielectric diagonal

12 March 2016 Steve Ringwood

Steve Ringwood casts his expert eye over and into a 2-inch push-fit dielectric mirror diagonal for refractors and catadioptrics from Explore Scientific. This star diagonal delivers optical fidelity since it has a mirror that has been honed to ¹/₁₂^th wave and reflects 99 percent of incoming light to the eyepiece.

Telescopes combine to push frontier on galaxy clusters

12 March 2016 Astronomy Now

Galaxy clusters are enormous collections of hundreds or even thousands of galaxies and vast reservoirs of hot gas embedded in massive clouds of dark matter. To learn more about clusters, including how they grow via collisions, astronomers have used some of the world’s most powerful X-ray, optical and radio telescopes. The name for this galaxy cluster project is the “Frontier Fields”.

What’s eating at Pluto?

11 March 2016 Astronomy Now

Far in the dwarf planet’s western hemisphere, scientists on NASA’s New Horizons mission have discovered what looks like a giant “bite mark” on Pluto’s surface. They suspect that the methane ice-rich surface on Pluto may be sublimating away into the atmosphere, exposing a layer of water-ice underneath.