Satellite News

X-Ray image of Proxima Centauri. Credit: ChandraClick to enlarge
If you want to send an interstellar probe, you’re going to chose the closest star. And that would be Proxima Centauri, located only 4.2 light years away. Since they first calculated its distance, astronomers have always assumed that Proxima Centauri was part of the Alpha Centauri triple star system. But recent calculations threw that assumption into doubt. Was its location purely a coincidence? Is Proxima Centauri flying solo through the Milky Way?

Globalstar Inc. filed a registration statement July 18 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission outlining a proposed $100 million…

Artist illustration of Cluster spacecraft. Image credit: ESAClick to enlarge
ESA’s Cluster spacecraft were in the right place at the right time on September 15, 2001. They flew through a region of the Earth’s magnetosphere at the exact moment that it reconfigured itself. The wealth of data will help scientists better model interactions between the Earth’s magnetosphere and the solar wind, as well as the magnetic fields around other stars and exotic objects with powerful magnetic fields.

Genesis 1 self portrait. Image credit: Bigelow AerospaceClick to enlarge
Bigelow Aerospace’s inflatable Genesis 1 habitat has a stowaway on board; an experiment for NASA called Genebox. This shoebox-sized experiment will allow NASA to measure the effects of near weightlessness on the genetic structure of microorganisms. Although this is the first Genebox, NASA is planning to launch several of them over the next few years as part of the Vision for Space Exploration.

Astrophoto: North American and Pelican Nebulae Image by Don GoldmanClick to enlarge
We live in a universe filled with galaxies. Galaxies are vast gravitationally bound aggregations of hydrogen gas clouds, stars that are produced when part of a cloud collapses under its own enormous weight, atoms that have been ionized by stellar radiation and dust formed from the remnants of previous stars that have either exploded or thrown off their outer layers during old age. Of these, the largest directly observable constituents are the hydrogen gas billows. Older terms survive within the astronomical lexicon. Any extended object in the sky (other than the Sun, Moon, planets and comets) has at one time or another been called a nebula. The root meaning, however, is cloud and it’s now most often used to reference places that contain gas and dust such as the view provided […]