NASA Is Readying IRIS Spacecraft For Launch In June
[WATCH VIDEO: 'IRIS Readies For A New Challenge' Mission Trailer] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA is getting ready to launch a new mission in June this year called the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS)....
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Delivers Core Efficiency Capabilities for Software-Defined Storage Solutions CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 21, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Permabit Technology Corporation, the recognized leader in data efficiency technology, today announced data compression and replication applications that integrate with Permabit Albireo Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO). The addition of Albireo COMPRESS and Albireo REPLICA to VDO's deduplication and thin provisioning capabilities provide essential building blocks for...
BENTON HARBOR, Mich., May 20, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Jeff Fettig, chairman and CEO for Whirlpool Corporation (NYSE: WHR), will deliver the keynote address today for the opening session at EE Global 2013, taking place May 20-21, 2013 in Washington, D.C. He will speak about Whirlpool Corporation's continued environmental responsibility as the leader in the global home appliance industry and will offer his remarks starting at 10 a.m. EDT. (Logo:...
[WATCH VIDEO: Coronal Mass Ejection On May 17, 2013] Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online On May 17, the sun unleashed an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME) at 5:24 a.m. EDT sending billions of tons of solar particles into space. The matter from this CME will likely reach Earth in one to three days and potentially affect electronic systems in satellites and possibly the International Space Station (ISS). NASA research models based on observations from...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Exchange of electromagnetic energy is fairly well understood. The force carrier, the photon, is readily detectable and manipulated, making the physics of electromagnetic radiation easy to study. By contrast, gravitational exchanges pose a much greater challenge. This arises, at least in part, because the gravitational force is so much weaker than that of electricity and magnetism. Also, the force carrier itself, the...
[ Watch the Video: Bright Explosion on the Moon ] Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online If you take a good look at the Moon it isn’t too difficult to paint a pretty clear picture of the lunar surface’s violent past. Our neighboring natural satellite is pock-marked with thousands upon thousands of craters from meteors and asteroids that have been pelting its surface for more than a billion years. Over the past eight years, NASA astronomers have been monitoring...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Predicting the weather is difficult. With varying pressures, planetary rotation and various other factors, weather systems on Earth border on chaos. But, believe it or not, predicting the weather on the third rock from the sun is rather straightforward compared to predicting the atmospheric motions of the gas giants that lay beyond the asteroid belt. The primary reason is that, unlike Earth, the Jovian worlds do not have...
[WATCH VIDEO: OSIRIS-REx To Investigate Asteroid Bennu] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA said it is moving forward with its plan to send a spacecraft to an asteroid to bring back a sample to Earth. The space agency's Origins-Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission to sample asteroid Bennu is moving ahead in preparation for its launch in 2016. After launch, OSIRIS-REx will rendezvous with the asteroid in...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA announced yesterday that its Kepler space telescope is stuck in standby mode, but one professor is already coming up with ideas to try and revive the observatory. Scott Hubbard, a consulting professor of aeronautics and astronautics, helped guide the Kepler mission when he served as director of NASA Ames Research Center. He has devised a few plans for the space agency that could potentially help bring the planet-hunting spacecraft...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers using the Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7) in South Africa have revealed giant outbursts from X-ray binary star system Circinus X-1. The team watched as the double star system fired off energetic matter from its core into the surrounding system in extensive, compact jets that flared brightly. Circinus X-1 is a neutron star system where the two stars orbit each other every 16.5 days in an elliptical orbit. When the two stars...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online How did life begin? This question has been the focus of intense research for centuries, and while we have made significant strides, the answer still eludes us. Understanding how the first proteins, amino acids, and other organic compounds came together to form the first living cells is vital in our search for finding potential life on other worlds. And we have long thought that the key to life, here on Earth anyway, is the...
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The prominent feature that allows for the existence of life on Earth is the Sun. Radiation from our closest star provides heat and energy to our planet, driving biological processes and providing the necessary conditions for liquid water to naturally exist. But our Sun is only but one star in this vast Universe. And as it turns out, most stars are quite different than the one that illuminates our day. For this reason, scientists have, for hundreds of years, attempted to study the other...
Image Caption: Artistic concept of a planetary system. Credit: Wikipedia/NASA/JPL-Caltech The term Astronomy encompasses a broad range of topics, including the study of stars, galaxies, and planets. In order to focus on the different areas of study, many subfields of astronomy emerge. One such area is the study of planets known, appropriately, as Planetary Astronomy. Observational Planetary Astronomy Even within the field of Planetary Astronomy, there are several divisions to...
Image Caption: The Hubble Extreme Deep Field (XDF) was completed in September 2012 and shows the farthest galaxies ever photographed by humans. Each speck of light in the photo is an individual galaxy, some of them as old as 13.2 billion years; the observable universe is estimated to contain more than 200 billion galaxies. Credit: NASA/Wikipedia What is Cosmology? I once commented to an acquaintance that I was fascinated by the field of Cosmology, and mused that if I had more time, I...
Image Caption: NGC 4414, a typical spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices, is about 56,000 light-years in diameter and approximately 60 million light-years distant. Credit: NASA/ESA/Wikipedia What is Astrophysics? For much of the modern age the term Astrophysics has been used synonymously with Astronomy. This interchange is so common that many textbooks even offer the two as having the same meaning. However, from a strictly historical perspective there are differences...
The Tropic of Capricorn, alternately called the Southern Tropic, is a marker of the most southerly latitude on the Earth at which the Sun can be directly overhead. This occurs at the December solstice, when the southern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun at its maximum degree. It is one of the five major circles of latitude that mark maps of the Earth. It presently lies 23 degrees 26’ 16’’ south of the Equator. Currently, the Tropic of Capricorn is drifting towards the north at...
![An Astronomer\](/media/gallery/spitzer-space-telescope-sirtf/thumbs/thumbs_746643main_pia17008_full.jpg "An Astronomer\")
