science wire

  John Groves   Photo by Brian Wilson   Tyler Groff   Photo by Denise Applewhite   Posted April 24, 2013; 11:30 a.m. by Catherine Zandonella, Office of the Dean for Research Two Princeto

Fully assembled Vega VV02 on pad ESA's Vega VV02 rocket is now fully assembled on its launch pad, 22 April, 2013. Final preparations are in full swing for the rocket's flight. Vega VV02 is the first of the five flights scheduled in ESA's Vega Research and Technology Accompaniment - VERTA - programme, which aims to demonstrate the flexibility of the launch system.

Following his lecture, former Vice President Al Gore answered questions from students Elise Timtim, Conor Doherty and Noemi Walzebuck.

23 April 2013 Artist's concept showing how a defunct satellite could be grappled for a controlled reentry into Earth's atmosphere, where it would burn up and be destroyed harmlessly.

University of Toronto astronomer Marten van Kerkwijk is the recipient of a 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

23 April 2013 ESA's Herschel space observatory has solved a long-standing mystery as to the origin of water in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, finding conclusive evidence that it was delivered by the dramatic impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in July 1994.

Herschel and Aquila ESA's Herschel space observatory set against a background image of stellar nursery W40, 1000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila.

Many collisions occur between asteroids and other objects in our solar system, but scientists are not always able to detect or track these impacts from Earth.

22 April 2013 A patchwork network of frozen ridges and troughs cover the face of Enceladus, Saturn's most enigmatic of icy moons.

19 April 2013 New views of the Horsehead Nebula and its turbulent environment have been unveiled by ESA's Herschel space observatory and the NASA/ESA Hubble space telescope.

19 April 2013 Ireland is setting an example for how space technologies can contribute to economic growth and recovery through the maritime sector.

Cambridge, MA - In our solar system, only one planet is blessed with an ocean: Earth. Our home world is a rare, blue jewel compared to the deserts of Mercury, Venus and Mars.

18 April 2013 The continuing growth in space debris poses an increasing threat to economically vital orbital regions.

A team including Dr Mat Page (UCL Space and Climate Physics) has discovered an extremely distant galaxy making stars more than 2000 times faster than our own Milky Way. Seen at a time when the Universe was less than a billion years old, its mere existence challenges our theories of galaxy evolution.

17 April 2013 ESA's Herschel space observatory has discovered an extremely distant galaxy making stars more than 2000 times faster than our own Milky Way. Seen at a time when the Universe was less than a billion years old, its mere existence challenges our theories of galaxy evolution. The galaxy, known as HFLS3, appears as little more than a faint, red smudge in images from the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES).

Smaller begets bigger. Such is often the case for galaxies, at least: the first galaxies were small, then eventually merged together to form the behemoths we see in the present universe. Those smaller galaxies produced stars at a modest rate; only later-when the universe was a couple of billion years old-did the vast majority of larger galaxies begin to form and accumulate enough gas and dust to become prolific star factories.

New telescope brings distant galaxies into sharp focus Durham University astronomers have played a key role in research using a powerful new telescope to bring images of the distant Universe into much sharper focus. Durham University astronomers have played a key role in research using a powerful new telescope to bring images of the distant Universe into much sharper focus.

The 'undiscovery' of an island by a team of scientists led by the University of Sydney resulted in worldwide scientific debate, the correction of databases and a re-evaluation of the infallibility of certain information.

A team led by the University of Warwick has pinpointed a new type of exceptionally powerful and long-lived cosmic explosion, prompting a theory that they arise in the violent death throes of a supergiant star. These explosions create powerful blasts of high energy gamma-rays, known as gamma-ray bursts, but while most bursts are over in about a minute, this new type can last for several hours.

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ATV Downloads Downloads Services 16 April 2013 A fuelling operator at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana inspects progress as ATV Albert Einstein is filled with propellant to take to the International Space Station.

Ship will be operated by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego U.S. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced the nation's newest research vessel will be named R/V Sally Rid

Trips to the South Pole usually require a lot of specialized equipment, but Nils Irland's packing list for his November 2012 visit included some items unusual even by those standards: a specially designed video camera, extra batteries, and lots and lots of data storage.

Ship will be operated by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego U.S. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced the nation's newest research vessel will be named R/V Sally Rid

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15 April 2013 This beautiful aurora illuminates the sky over the snow-clad landscape near Tromsø, Norway. These colourful displays are produced when electrically charged particles travelling from the Sun in the solar wind are channelled along Earth's magnetic field lines and strike atoms high in the atmosphere.

He's one of the few people in the world to master the art of astronomy at -70C. Keith Vanderlinde spent 11 months working on-site with the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica before joining U of T's Dunlap Institute and Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics a few years later.

3D printed Rudolf This Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer was made using a patented 3D-printing process developed for producing strong and heat-resistant metal and ceramic lattices.

This picture of Earth and the ionosphere, taken with a handheld camera by an astronaut on the International Space Station, shows a bright red wall of plasma near the equator.

ATV Downloads Downloads Services 11 April 2013 ESA's space freighter ATV Albert Einstein will be the heaviest spacecraft ever launched into space by an Ariane rocket when it lifts off to the International Space Station on 5 June.

ATV Downloads Downloads Services 11 April 2013 ESA's space freighter ATV Albert Einstein will be the heaviest spacecraft ever launched into space by an Ariane rocket when it lifts off to the International Space Station on 5 June.

11 April 2013 Dramatic underground explosions, perhaps involving ice, are responsible for the pits inside these two large martian impact craters, imaged by ESA's Mars Express on 4 January.

10 April 2013 Satellite engineers learn to get used to the weirdly hushed interior of the Compact Payload Test Range in ESA's ESTEC technical centre area, in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

10 April 2013 Track your skiing, speed, altitude, slopes and lift kilometres with a nifty phone app from an ESA business incubation start-up.

A system that imitates navigation of a space rover, originally intended for use in North West schools, will become part of NASA's International Space Apps Challenge later this month.

Astronaut training Related articles Services Calendar 9 April 2013 ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet waves as he descends to a mockup of the International Space Station at NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston, USA.

9 April 2013 ESA's Herschel space observatory has provided the first images of a dust belt - produced by colliding comets or asteroids - orbiting a subgiant star known to host a planetary system. After billions of years steadily burning hydrogen in their cores, stars like our Sun exhaust this central fuel reserve and start burning it in shells around the core.

8 April 2013 The structural model of the Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module, or EDM, of ESA's 2016 ExoMars mission has been subjected to a series of intense shaker tests to simulate the rigours of launching into space. EDM will be launched to Mars together with the Trace Gas Orbiter and will test key landing technologies in preparation for the 2018 ExoMars rover mission and subsequent missions to Mars.

$200 million project will launch telescopes to perform full-sky search for transiting exoplanets. Following a three-year competition, NASA has selected the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) project at MIT for a planned launch in 2017.

Physicists visit neutrino experiment site Physicists from the University of Sussex are in the USA this month helping to set up the largest-ever experiment into neutrinos to be built there, just weeks after its neutrino detector, which is still under construction, recorded its first three-dimensional images of particles.

05 Apr 2013 University of Manchester archaeologists have started the excavation of an enormous building complex in Iraq, thought to be around 4,000 years old. The team, directed by Professor Stuart Campbell and Dr Jane Moon, both from Manchester, and independent archaeologist Robert Killick, first spotted the amazing structure - thought to be an administrative complex serving one of the world's earliest cities- on satellite.

Science journalist Tatiana Moreno talks to Dr Apostolos Voulgarakis about the impact of airborne pollutants on our planet's changing climate. Some airborne pollutants change the make-up of our planet's atmosphere where, according to a wealth of recent research, they can strongly influence regional and global climate.

A decade ago, spurred by a question for a fifth-grade science project, University of Washington physicist John Cramer devised an audio recreation of the Big Bang that started our universe nearly 14 billion years ago.

Human travel to Mars has long been the unachievable dangling carrot for space programs. Now, astronauts could be a step closer to our nearest planetary neighbor through a unique manipulation of nuclear fusion, the same energy that powers the sun and stars.

The antimatter hunter AMS-02 on the International Space Station is searching for the missing pieces of our Universe. The project's first results published today are hinting at a new phenomenon and revealing more about the invisible 'dark matter'. AMS-02, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, consists of seven instruments that monitor cosmic rays from space.

Born in Kenya, now commuting between the Alps and London, Professor Tejinder Virdee is a particle physicist working at the CMS experiment at CERN.

Latest pictures from Planck satellite have mapped the whole Universe as it was just after the Big Bang Pictures taken by Europe's Planck satellite are giving scientists a view of the Universe that's more than 50 million years older than anything they have previously seen.

Imperial marks pioneering physicist Tom Kibble's 80th birthday with a guest lecture from Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.