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Lifehacker
Here's something you've never seen before: Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, caught on video as its orbit takes it behind the gaseous giant. Incredible.
Looks like Hubble may turn to be a key in finding extraterrestrial life. A new technique developed by NASA has found CO2, one of the byproducts of life, in a Jupiter-sized planet called HD189733b:
Huge astronomy news! For the first time EVER, galaxy researchers have taken pictures of planets orbiting a sun-star, much like our own. The first, taken by the much beloved Hubble Telescope, shows a planet orbiting the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis. The second picture, snapped by upstaging Hawaiian observatories Gemini and Keck, shows two young planets orbiting a completely different star located 130 light-years from us! Take that Hubble! But I warn you—like the ultrasounds your friends show you of their three-month old fetus—these pictures wow mostly because of what they are, not because of what they look like.
The Hubble space telescope, despite its foibles, is perhaps best known for the humbling, amazing, and awesome image known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF). The HUDF, assembled from 800 separate exposures, offered humans an incredible look back at the history of the universe (and no fewer than 10,000 galaxies). Well, another magnificent piece of human engineering, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, played some cosmic Chasing the Jones' this past week when it captured the deepest ground-based U-band image of the universe. Ever. We are so small.
Space junkies, go to town with the full presser below. And, for those of you with some time on your hands, the ESO has a link to the full 80 MB TIFF image in the page we linked to below.
The Hubble Telescope, which was quite nearly lost this month to a combination of old age and a fritzy 486, has resumed "regular science operations" today, and sent back this spectacular picture of a pair of galaxies engaging in some kind of celestial slow dance. The mission to replace the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling unit (SIC&DH), the temperamental system at the heart this whole debacle, is planned for April of next year. Until then we'll be able to depend on a steady supply of cosmo-porn, courtesy of the Hubble's backup systems.
Hold the phone, people, the Hubble is still broken. There was word early Thursday morning that a Monkey Island-era 486 backup computer was going to take the reigns and begin mission critical operations, but a day later NASA scientists revealed the dusty old thing was better suited for minesweeper than capturing awe-inspiring deep field images of the observable universe.
After its latest problems, the space telescope Hubble is back online, getting back into the whole UFO catching business while waiting for the life-extending risky repair mission that will give it a new computer and updated components. Like the 486-based back-up computer, these components will have to work flawlessly for a long time, which is why NASA is putting them through the chamber of horrors you can see in the video.
Prospects were starting to look pretty grim for the venerable Hubble telescope. Following a communications breakdown, the Hubble team postponed their scheduled repair mission from October 14th until this coming February, at the earliest. Until then, the Hubble's usable data transmission abilities would depend on one thing: the successfully booting of a 486 backup system, last powered on before the Hubble Launch over 18 years ago. Well, the Hubble team has just reported that the dusty old computer seems like it's working just fine.
The complicated Hubble repair and upgrade mission scheduled for October 14th just got even more complicated: Last Saturday, the Hubble's command and data-handling system broke down, rendering it unable to capture and transmit images to Earth. And while Nasa doesn't know what the heck has happened--I'm thinking a bunch of aliens angry with this galactic Peeping Tom--they are actually happy this has occurred now, according to Nasa's science chief Ed Weiler:
This is exactly why we send astronauts to risk their life to service Hubble: in a paper published last week in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists detail the discovery of a new unidentified object in the middle of nowhere. I don't know about you, but when a research paper conclusion says "We suggest that the transient may be one of a new class" I get a chill of oooh-aaahness down my spine. Specially when after a hundred days of observation, it disappeared from the sky with no explanation. Get your tin foil hats out, because it gets even weirder.
Here's something you've never seen before: Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, caught on video as its orbit takes it behind the gaseous giant. Incredible.
After its 