Though the eleven year solor cycle as well as the Southern Oscillation hit their minimum 2007 is recorded as second warmth year in the period of instrumental data.
More:
Wikipedia: Solar Cycle
Marshall Space Flight Center: NASA Satellites Capture Start of New Solar Cycle
Goddard Institute for Space Studies : Global Temperature Trends: 2007 Summation
The Rosetta mission is one of the most challenging ever attempted. Started 2nd March 2004 Rosetta will use fly-bys of Mars and Earth to accelerate and then rendezvous with comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It will land, take probes - some 4.6 billion years old - to find out if life on Earth was initiated by comet seeding. (more…)
Solar-B is an international mission to study our nearest star, the sun. To accomplish this, the Solar-B mission includes a suite of three science instruments — the Solar Optical Telescope, X-ray Telescope and Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer.
The satellite’s polar orbit will allow its instruments to stay in continuous contact with the Sun for nine months of the year. SOLAR-B will operate for at least three years. Hinode’s operations center is located at JAXA’s facility in Sagamihara, Japan. (more…)
The Cosmological Evolution Survey (COSMOS) was biggest ever realized with Hubble Space Telescope (HST). For 2 years the survey observed and photographed [SkyWalker] a small portion of the sky. Within 2 square degree over 2 million galaxies were detected. By comparison, the EarthÂ’s moon is one-half degree across.
Every look into space is a look back in time. COSMOS pictured 75% of universe lifetime - more than 10 billion years. It needed nearly 1000 Hubble hours to take 575 photos. All stitched together make a file of ~100GB with 100,800 x 100,800 pixels. [same with 3508 x 3508 pixel] (more…)
From now (2007-01-08) the moon is metric and the radius measures 1,737.4 kilometers, the mass is 7.35E19 metric tons and the density is about 3.34 grams per cubic centimeter roughly 60 percent of Earth’s density.
NASA will return to Moon by 2020 and plans a manned lunar outpost with kilometeters instead of miles.
The decision is a victory not only for the metric system itself, which by this decision increases its land area in the solar system by 27%, but also for the spirit of international cooperation in exploring the Moon.
The decision arose from a series of meetings that brought together representatives from NASA and 13 other space agencies to discuss ways to cooperate and coordinate their lunar exploration programs. Standardizing on the metric system was an obvious step in the right direction.
Isn’t that more futuristic: NASA will even bring the Internet Protocol (IP) to the moon? Listen!
Picture credit: University of Iowa Robotic Telescope Facilities
Since March 10th, 2006, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) orbits planet Mars. On board are six instruments and one is the HiRISE camera.
The HiRISE Operations Center (HiROC) at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory started to publish the photos from Primary Science Phase and Transition Phase now at their website.
Picture above was constructed of a 2048 x 7151 pixel image and covers same portion of a delta that partially fills Eberswalde crater in Margaritifer Sinus at two different scales.
The HiRISE camera was built by Ball Aerospace and Technology Corporation and is operated by the University of Arizona.
Photographer Thierry Legault shot this spectacular image.
It shows the transit of the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle Atlantis 50 minutes after undocking from the ISS in front of the Sun on 17 September 2006 13:38:50 UTC. (more…)
Not a picture from this planet, but impressive anyway. Hopefully Hubble telescope will take more pictures from our universum in future.
This one has been composed and mosaiqued using 51 individual Hubble photos plus a few ground-based.
Galaxy Messier 101 is 25 million light years away, direction Great Bear.
Image credit goes to to NASA and ESA. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between both.
