Archive – Page 346 – Astronomy Now

Dawn spacecraft’s geological maps of asteroid Vesta

25 November 2014 Astronomy Now

Launched in 2007, Nasa’s Dawn spacecraft orbited and surveyed large asteroid Vesta between July 2011 and September 2012. This detailed map is the culmination of a two-and-a-half-year geological mapping campaign.

3D view of Philae’s descent to comet

24 November 2014 Astronomy Now

Put on your red-blue 3D glasses to appreciate this view of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as seen by Philae’s ROLIS imaging system from a distance of 2 miles (3 km).

NASA's reworked image of Europa based on late 1990s data from the Galileo spacecraft.

NASA’s ‘remastered’ view of Europa

21 November 2014 Astronomy Now

NASA uses modern processing techniques to rework a mosaic of images sent back by the Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s, delivering a high-resolution view of this icy ocean world in natural colours.

UK team announces plan to crowd-source moon mission

20 November 2014 Stephen Clark

Scientists hope private backers will kick-start a mission to land a robotic probe on the South Pole of the moon within the next 10 years, drill deep into lunar bedrock and analyze primordial core samples to study the origins of the solar system.

Gravity saved the universe after the Big Bang?

19 November 2014 Astronomy Now

Recent theories suggest that the production of Higgs particles in the inflationary phase of the early universe should have led to instability and collapse. Now a European team offers an explanation why this didn’t happen, answering fundamental questions about how we are all here.

Illustris Collaboration depiction of large-scale structure in the universe.

Quasar axes align with large-scale cosmic structures

19 November 2014 Astronomy Now

A European research team has used data from ESO’s Very large Telescope in Chile to discover that the rotational axes of quasars align with large-scale structures in the universe.

Saturn’s swirling palette

18 November 2014 Astronomy Now

The fluid dynamics of Saturn’s upper cloud layers are interpreted in artistic terms in this 23rd August 2014 image from the Cassini-Huygens mission.

MAVEN begins science mission at Mars

18 November 2014 Stephen Clark

NASA’s newest Mars orbiter has formally started a one-year research campaign to study an ancient case of climate change that starved the red planet of water, breathable air and potential life, scientists said Monday.

Rosetta’s OSIRIS camera captures Philae’s bounce across comet

17 November 2014 Astronomy Now

A stunning sequence of images from Rosetta’s narrow-angle OSIRIS camera shows the dramatic journey of the Philae lander as it approaches and bounces on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on 12th November 2014.

Spiral galaxy NGC 986 in the constellation of Fornax

Hubble captures spiral galaxy in the Furnace

17 November 2014 Ade Ashford

This new Hubble image is a snapshot of NGC 986 — a barred spiral galaxy in the southern constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), discovered by James Dunlop in 1828.