Mission to asteroids is on its way

An unmanned spaceprobe blasted off today on a mission into the heart of the asteroid belt - using technology straight out of Star Wars. Nasa's Dawn mission will fly into a band of thousands of rocky worlds that lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It will seek to discover more about the biggest two of these mini-planets, Ceres and Vesta. The probe launched, rather fittingly, shortly after dawn local time on September 27, from pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Aboard the ship is a chip carrying the names of more than 360,000 space fans from around the world who submitted their details to Nasa. Dawn will fly on a four-billion mile journey, propelled by three ion engines like those that drive the fighter ships in Star Wars. It will take four years to reach its first target, Vesta, spending six months there, then move on to Ceres, the largest of the asteroids, which was promoted to the status of dwarf planet last year when Pluto got downsized. Arrival at Ceres is due in February 2015. The thrusters, which produce beams of electrically charged atoms, have to fire for months at a time to build speed and steer the spacecraft. Over eight years, they will fire for a total 50,000 hours - a record for a spacecraft. Vesta and Ceres are different in their make-up. Vesta, which can just be glimpsed with the naked eye, is 350 miles across and thought to be mainly a rocky world like Earth, while 600-mile wide Ceres is an icy body like the outer planets. Both will provide important clues about the formation of the solar system. Principal Investigator Christopher Russell, of the University of California, Los Angeles, said: "These two very diverse bodies reside in essentially the same neighbourhood. It is one of the mysteries Dawn hopes to solve." Colleague David Lindstrom said: "Understanding conditions that lead to the formation of planets is a goal of Nasa's mission of exploration. The science returned from Vesta and Ceres could unlock many of the mysteries of the formation of the rocky planets including Earth." Dawn is lucky to be flying. The £255 million mission was cancelled by Nasa to save money but reprieved just weeks later, last year, after protests from planetary scientists. The Nasa photo shows final checks being carried out on the Dawn spacecraft. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Nasa put a damper on Mars water

Nasa space scientists are backtracking over sensational claims that they have found signs of liquid water still flowing on Mars. Detailed new studies from a spaceprobe flying overhead reveal that deposits on crater slopes were probably just landslides of dry debris. The discovery is a setback to alien hunters who claim that the Red Planet could still harbour simple life forms. Other findings by the latest probe to orbit Mars undermine arguments that the planet once had a sustained wet, rainy climate, although it confirms that liquid water has been present. The deposits, hundreds of meters long, were heralded by Nasa in December as powerful evidence that water was still flowing on Mars. Scientist claimed they were gullies caused by water surging under pressure from beneath the martian surface. They said the equivalent of up to ten swimming pools of water had flowed down two slopes in the Terra Sirenum and Centauri Montes regions of southern Mars. Nasa claimed the water had vapourised as it flowed, leaving white deposits that had not shown up on photos of the surface taken just a few years earlier. The discovery - hailed as the most important ever on Mars - came after tens of thousands of gullies were snapped from orbit by Nasa's Mars Global Surveyor probe over nearly ten years. Now a second probe, carrying the most powerful camera ever flown to another world, plus other advanced instruments, has put the damper on the discovery. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which arrived at the planet last year, looked closely at the new features. The MRO probe's chief scientist, Alfred McEwen, said: "The key question raised by these two deposits is whether water is coming to the surface of Mars today. Our evidence suggests the new deposits did not necessarily involve water." One of the fresh deposits is a stripe of bright material several hundred yards long that was not present in 1999 but appeared by 2004. The new orbiter's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars reveals the deposit is not frost, ice or a mineral left behind by evaporation of salty water. Scientists also examined the slopes above this and five other locations with bright and apparently young deposits. They found the slopes were steep enough for sand or loose, dry dust to flow down the gullies. MRO's high-res camera also dealt a blow to arguments for a long-term wet climate on Mars by examining branched channels and fan like deposits typical of water flows that were found around several impact craters. The probe found that the flows were probably caused by the asteroid impacts themselves rather than Martian rain. Nasa points out, however, that other gullies still offer overwhelming evidence that liquid water has flowed on Mars within the last few million years and it is thought Mars was once covered by vast oceans. Europe's Mars Express has detected huge reserves of water ice around the Martian south pole. Nasa's latest lander, Phoenix, is currently on its way to Mars to dig into the icy soil. Professor Colin Pillinger, who led the brave but ill-fated Beagle 2 mission to Mars in 2003, told Skymania News: "There is still overwhelming evidence of big flows of water in the past on Mars. You really need to get on the ground to study these things. "It has been proposed that a lander be sent to a region where deposits were detected and that is still a good idea. They say a picture is worth a thousand words but an analysis is worth a thousand pictures." ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

One giant leap for Google Moon

Much has already been written about Google's announcement, last week, of a $30 million prize for the first privately-funded space mission to land a robot probe on the Moon. It took a bit of the gloss off a potentially seismic shift in the UK's attitude to space exploration - an official working group recommended the same day that Britain form its own astronaut corps. Google took the biggest headlines but I must confess that my first thoughts were: I hope they're not going to rely on Google Moon to plan the landings. I recalled the somewhat crude early implementation of Google Maps which produced a cheesy joke if you zoomed in to try to view any detail. I was being unfair. I decided to take a fresh look at Google Moon and the new collaboration announced between Google and Nasa in December is clearly already bearing fruit. For most of the our natural satellite you can now close in to view detail just a few miles across, thanks to imagery from the unmanned Clementine craft that orbited the Moon in the Nineties. The areas where the Apollo lunar modules landed are imaged in even greater detail and you can virtually land yourself between tiny craterlets. But there is more. In a parallel to the street-mapping layer of Google Maps, the lunar model provides geologic and topographic charts produced since Nasa began planning for their own missions to the Moon. They seem a little clunky in the way they operate at present but no doubt the experience will become more streamlined as work develops. You can't yet use the program Google Earth to view the Moon in the same way you can now pan the heavens with Google Sky, but intriguingly the Google team say they are working on that! The image is from a screen grab of Google Moon in elevation mode. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Jodrell bid for cinema record

Britain's Jodrell Bank telescope will become the biggest cinema screen in the world next month to celebrate its golden jubilee. Movies 150ft tall will be projected onto the giant radio dish's surface for two nights when it is turned to face an open-air audience at Knutsford, Cheshire. Clips during the shows, on October 5th and 6th, will include images of early space exploration, astronomy, plus film of construction of the telescope, now named after founder Sir Bernard Lovell. The telescope came into operation in October, 1957, coinciding with the dawn of the space age. It hit the headlines almost immediately by tracking the launch of the world's first satellite, Sputnik 1, by the Soviet Union. It also received the first pictures transmitted from the previously unseen far side of the Moon in 1959 and the first pictures from the lunar surface in 1966. Earlier this year, radio hams kicked off Jodrell Bank's jubilee celebrations by bouncing birthday greeting messages off the Moon, to be picked up by the 250ft wide radio dish. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Jurassic parklife to fly in space

Primitive life-forms from a real life Jurassic Park will find themselves rocketed on a trip into orbit this week. The simple organisms, collected in rocks from South West England, could help UK scientists discover if life was brought to Earth from outer space. Samples taken from cliffs at Beer on East Devon's famous Jurassic Coast, have been fitted to the outside of a Russian spacecraft's heat shield. The Foton-M3 capsule will be launched by a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan this Friday - and indeed it all sounds like something out of Borat. But the 400kg European payload of rocks, plus micro organisms, antibodies, and fluorescent dyes, is part of serious research into the origins of life. They will also help with investigations into how astronauts could survive a lengthy mission to Mars. The spacecraft will spent nearly 12 days in low-Earth orbit where the payload - called Biopan - will be exposed directly to the harsh, airless environment of space. The samples will endure extreme temperatures, cosmic rays and harmful radiation from the sun, plus a near-perfect vacuum. A similar experiment on another spacecraft, Foton-M2, suggested two years ago that samples of lichen had survived a space vacuum. Fragments of rocks from the Jurassic Coast - a World Heritage Site in the same league as the Grand Canyon - are fitted directly to the latest probe's heat shield where they will experience the additional effects of re-entry including searing heat. UK scientists want the samples to get similar treatment to meteorites that spend aeons in deep space before falling to Earth. When they are returned to the ground, in a remote part of the Kazakhstan-Russian border, the experts will be eager to see if the "Devon-to-heaven" organisms have survived their space trip. Professor Charles Cockell, of the Open University, said: "We know that life can make it from continent to continent, but what about from planet to planet? Of course, at the moment we don’t know of life on another planet, but this experiment is an intriguing test of an interplanetary version of an old ecological question and can at least tell us whether the Earth has always remained a biological island in space." Dr David Cullen, of Cranfield University, said the tests on how antibodies and dyes behaved through a space mission were all critical issues for a future Mars mission. Dr Mark Sims, of Leicester University, said: “Space is inherently a risky business but there are only so many tests that you can do on the ground. Biopan provides us with a platform to expose biological samples to a space radiation environment in order to confirm their survivability.” Last year, Indian scientists controversially claimed to have detected alien life forms in mysterious red rain. Evidence for alien life has allegedly been found in a meteorite. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Record survey by X-ray scope

Space scientists have compiled the biggest ever survey of the universe as seen through X-ray eyes. It catalogues nearly a quarter of a million objects observed by a European space telescope called XMM Newton. Their results will be an invaluable aid for astronomers studying some of the most violent activity in deep space from objects such as black holes. The 2XMM catalogue was created by the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre, a consortium of institutions led by the University of Leicester, on behalf of the European Space Agency. A total of 3,491 pictures of the sky were examined to locate the vast number of objects beaming out X-rays. The satellite has been operating since it was launched in 1999 and has found some of the most distant galaxies in the universe. Professor Mike Watson, principal investigator at Leicester, commented: "The 2XMM catalogue is the largest compilation of X-ray emitting objects ever made, containing nearly a quarter of a million entries. This has been possible because of the longevity of the XMM-Newton mission and the highly sensitive instruments onboard the satellite." He added: "XMM-Newton is particularly suited to measuring the more penetrating X-rays which makes it ideal for finding the signatures of accreting black holes that are obscured behind gas and dust in many galaxies. "The 2XMM catalogue is already unveiling new, exciting and unusual X-ray sources, including evidence of hidden violent activity in the centres of many distant galaxies that were previously thought to be quiet." Another X-ray telescope, called Chandra, revealed the presence of a thousand black holes in a snapshot of the sky earlier this year. Even more anazingly, it observed a background "fog" that astronomers believe could be 300 million super-massive black holes. Picture: An artist's impression of XMM Newton in space. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Saturn's 15 minutes of fame

Space scientists have knocked 15 minutes off the length of a day on Saturn because the ringed planet is spinning faster than they thought. The new measurement of Saturn's rotation period is 10 hours, 32 minutes and 35 seconds, according to scientists Gerald Schubert, of the University of California, and John Anderson, of Global Aerospace, Los Angeles. They based their figures on measurements made by Nasa's Pioneer, Voyager and Cassini spaceprobes. The figure has been hard to pin down because Saturn is a giant ball of gas rather than a solid world like Earth. The scientists admit their estimate is little more than a best guess. Any solid core is hidden deep below Saturn's opaque layers of clouds. Although 15 minutes might not sound a lot, it has great implications for understanding Saturn's weather system. It means that winds there are blowing less rapidly than thought and in more than one direction. Experts say it could even alter astronomers' understanding of how such gas planets form, the journal Science reports. However, as the researchers admit, there is still much uncertainty over the true rotation period. The Voyager probes, whose data was used, have now spent 30 years in space. The Nasa image above is from Cassini. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Asteroid smash doomed dinos

A catastrophic collision between two asteroids deep in the solar system led directly to the death of the dinosaurs, scientists reveal this week. The cosmic crash, 160 million years ago, caused one space mountain, more than 100 miles wide, to break into an "asteroid shower" of numerous giant rocks that spiralled in to threaten the inner planets. After nearly 100 million years circling the sun, one struck Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, 65 million years ago, creating the Chicxulub crater triggering a mass extinction that did for the dinosaurs. Other fragments became missiles that blasted out a prominent young crater on the Moon called Tycho, plus similar craters that have been detected on Mars and Venus. A fifth of the "Near Earth Objects" - asteroids that still threaten to hit Earth today - are from the same asteroid shower. One large remnant of the original shattered space rock that is still roaming the solar system has been identified as an asteroid called Baptistina, scientists report in the science journal Nature. The Nasa-funded celestial detective work was carried out by a joint team of scientists from the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and Charles University in Prague. They traced the devastating impact in Mexico back to a breakup event in the main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter, around 160 million years ago, plus or minus 20 million years. Baptistina's parent world was shattered into fragments including around 300 that were more than ten km wide (around 6 miles) and 140,000 bigger than one km. It doubled the number of impacts happening on Earth, the Moon, Mars and Venus over the last 100-200 million years, say the team. Dr William Bottke, of Colorado, and his team combined astronomical observations with computer simulations to calculate how the orbits of the asteroid fragments evolved over time under pressures such as sunlight. They calculated a 90 per cent probability that the 110-mile wide Chicxulub crater in Mexico was formed by one of the giant missiles, and the threat of more impacts is not over. Asteroids are regularly being spotted passing close to Earth. Dr Bottke said: "We are in the tail end of this shower now. Our simulations suggest that about 20 percent of the present-day, near-Earth asteroid population can be traced back to the Baptistina family." The picture is an artist's impression of an asteroid collision. Gemini Observatory/Jon Lomberg. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Gigapixel camera to hunt asteroids

Scientists have built the world's biggest digital camera to watch the heavens. Among other things, it will help guard the Earth against killer asteroids. The record-breaking instrument snaps photos with a resolution of more than 1.4 billion pixels - around 200 times bigger than those taken with a typical modern megapixel home camera. The gigapixel camera was constructed at the University of Hawaii and has been installed on a telescope called Pan-Starrs-1 on the nearby mountaintop at Haleakla, Maui. It will be used to scan the night sky for asteroids threatening the Earth - one flew close by earlier this year - and also build a detailed catalogue of stars and galazies. When fully operational, each patch of sky visible from Hawaii will be photographed automatically at least once a week. Pictures taken by the camera will be scrutinised by powerful computers for tiny changes indicating movement of a previously undiscovered asteroid. Other computers will combine the data from several images, calculate the orbit of the asteroid, and warn if it has any chance of colliding with Earth during the next century. As previously reported, plans are being drawn up to deal with this threat. Astronomer John Tonry, whose team built the camera, said: "This is a truly giant instrument. It allows us to measure the brightness of the sky in 1.4 billion places simultaneously. It's also extremely sensitive. In a typical observation we will be able to detect stars that are ten million times fainter than can be seen with the naked human eye." UK astronomers from the Universities of Durham, Edinburgh and Queen's, Belfast, have joined the international consortium that will operate the camera. Professor John Peacock, of Edinburgh, said: "Pan-Starrs will give us the largest ever three-dimensional picture of the universe. We are able to look back in time to the origins of all structures from galaxies down to stars and planets. The next few years should be really exciting." ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.

Meteor burst is bang on target

A spectacular outburst of shooting stars yesterday has given astronomers new information about what lies at the edge of the solar system. Scientists had predicted that, on September 1, the Earth would run through a stream of debris ejected by an ancient comet as it passed close to the Sun about 2,000 years ago. The celestial wanderer itself, called Comet Kiess, was next seen in 1911. Experts calculated that the dust cloud it threw off two millennia ago would move into our planet's path this year. The forecasts came after surprise meteor bursts were seen from the dust stream in 1935, 1986 and 1994. The peaks were short-lived but witnesses counted tens of brilliant meteors in just a few minutes. The meteors were called the Aurigids because they appeared to radiate from the constellation of Auriga, the Charioteer, as they streamed into the atmosphere. Meteor experts Esko Lyytinen, Peter Jenniskens and Jeremie Vaubaillon predicted that this year's outburst would occur around 11.38 UT and be visible from the western USA and Pacific region shortly before dawn. Stargazers who got up early to check the skies were rewarded with a fine display of meteors, though not in the hundreds that some were speculating. One blogger, for example, reported seeing 15 "really good ones" in half an hour which is a very healthy rate. Peter Jenniskens, a research scientist with the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute, flew with 23 colleagues aboard a Nasa Gulfstream jet to check on the shower and analyse what the meteors were made of by photographing their spectra. Their flight over the Pacific was a great success and showed that the predictions for the outburst were remarkably accurate - it lasted at least two hours and peaked at around 11.15 UT, 18 minutes earlier than forecast. Jenniskens said, on landing: "As expected, many Aurigids were as bright as the brighter stars on the sky. Some meteors were bluish or greenish in color, as reported for the 1994 return. "Many, many meteors were recorded during the mission, and a large number of spectra were measured. This is the first time in history that an Aurigid shower was predicted, and the result has been a feast for data-starved astronomers." Astronomers believe the rare encounter with a long-period comet will tell them more about the make-up of Comet Kiess and deep-frozen material in the Oort cloud at the edge of the solar system, beyond Pluto. Photo: Kat de Kleer, Nasa/Seti Institute. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com • Skymania welcomes your comments on our stories! For more space reading, check out the Skymania stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence.