Jules Verne burns up in fireball

Europe's most advanced and sophisticated spaceship crashed into the Pacific today as a blazing fireball. The unmanned Jules Verne was sent in a controlled dive by mission controllers in Toulouse, France. It ended a six-month mission which sent the craft on a visit to the International Space Station. Yesterday astronauts watched from the space station and two chase planes followed the craft as two engine firings sent it into a steep dive. Aircraft and shipping had been warned to stay clear of a crash zone 1,700 miles long and 125 miles wide, east of New Zealand. The maiden flight of the Automated Transfer Vehicle was a huge success and NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has led calls for it to be developed into Europe's very own crew-carrying spacecraft. By monitoring its break-up as it tumbled through the atmosphere, the European Space Agency aim to improve the design which would help them develop a manned spaceship. The craft currently acts as a space tug. Jules Verne carried supplies to the space station and displayed a textbook docking using automatic laser-guided systems. The ship, which resembled a craft from Star Wars thanks to its X-shaped solar panels, saved astronauts from potential disaster when its rockets were used to move the space station out of the way of dangerous satellite debris. It also became a favourite anexe of the orbiting outpost where astronauts could relax or hang their sleeping bags. The Jules Verne was finally used as a garbage truck. It was filled with waste from the space station before undocking on September 5. The next ATV is due to be launched in 2010 from Kourou in the French Guiana jungle of South America. Picture: A photo of the break-up of the Jules Verne taken from a DC-8 chase plane. (ESA). • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. You can support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

First photo of planet around alien star

Astronomers believe they have taken the first amazing photo of a planet around another star like the Sun. The alien world shows up as a tiny orange disk in the image captured by Canadian scientists with a giant telescope in Hawaii. Previous pictures of so-called extrasolar planets orbiting other stars have been painted by artists. The new world was spotted 500 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius, the scorpion. Astronomers were puzzled by its distance from its parent star which is 330 times further than we are from the sun. But they carried out detective work with other techniques to confirm that the planet and the star lie at roughly the same distance from us and so are probably connected. Before now, the only planet-like bodies imaged outside the solar system have been floating freely or been circling brown dwarfs, which are thought to be stars that failed to ignite. Special equipment fitted to the Gemini North Telescope, called adaptive optics, was used to remove distortions caused by turbulence in the atmosphere that would have hidden the planet from view. That gave the astronomers a clear image of a world which would otherwise have been invisible because of the star's twinkling. It is thought to be about eight times the mass, or size, of Jupiter, biggest planet in our own solar system. The star has the catchy name of 1RXS J160929.1-210524 and lies in a cluster of relatively young stars called the Upper Scorpius association. "This is the first time we have directly seen a planetary mass object in a likely orbit around a star like our Sun," said David Lafrenicre, lead author of a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Colleague Ray Jayawardhana said: "This discovery is yet another reminder of the truly remarkable diversity of worlds out there." More than 300 extrasolar planets have been found since the first was detected in the early 1990s. Last year one was discovered in a star's so-called habitable region, or Goldilocks zone, raising the possibility that it could be home to life. Photo: Gemini Observatory. • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. You can support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Rosetta homes in on rare asteroid

A UK-backed space probe will visit a peculiar potato-shaped world tomorrow night to find out clues about how planets formed. Europe's $1.5 billion Rosetta spacecraft flies past the three-mile wide asteroid Steins at around 8pm UK time, Friday evening, four and a half years after it was launched from French Guiana. The three-ton, unmanned ship will pass around 500 miles from Steins which is one of the rarest types of asteroid and thought to be a fragment of a much larger one that broke up. Scientists believe it is older than the planets and similar to the material that collected to form worlds like the Earth more than four billion years ago. During its flypast, Rosetta will make accurate photos and measurements of the asteroid's size, shape and volume. It will also check whether Steins has any mini moons of its own. The encounter will happen 224 million miles away from Earth and results will take 20 minutes to reach us when they are radioed back across space. Following the flyby, Rosetta will head for another asteroid called Lutetia in 2010 and then on to a final rendezvoud with a comet called Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. It will go into orbit around the comet and try to land a probe on it. Rosetta has been bouncing around the solar system during its long flight, gaining momentum from close passes to the Earth and Mars. It sent home stunning images of our own planet during one flyby. Last year, in an embarrassing moment false alarm for astronomers, it was itself mistaken for a threatening asteroid when it was spotted heading for a planned close approach. There is much UK involvement from industry and science in the Rosetta mission. Several companies helped build the probe and scientists from universities on the mainland and Northern Ireland are involved in ten of its 21 experiments. • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. You can support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com