Latest Great Observatories program Stories

SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 11, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Between March 18 and April 8, Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] invited fans to participate in "Innovation Madness," a tournament-style competition to vote for the ultimate Lockheed Martin innovation on the company's Facebook page. Approximately 32 innovations from Lockheed Martin's storied 100-year history were featured in the tournament, which was part of the corporation's year-long centennial commemoration. The venerable Hubble Space...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Two of NASA's great observatories, the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, have teamed up to uncover a mysterious infant star that behaves like a strobe light. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Every 25.34 days, the object, designated LRLL 54361, unleashes a burst of light. Although a similar phenomenon has been observed in two other young stellar objects, this is the most powerful such beacon seen to...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA has released a new image of the Cygnus OB2 star cluster, detailing its structure and evolution. The Milky Way, as well as other galaxies in the universe, are home to numerous young star clusters with hundreds of thousands of hot, massive, young stars known as O and B stars. Cygnus OB2 is one of these clusters that contains no less than 60 O-type stars and upwards of a thousand B-type stars. Using the Chandra X-Ray...

Dr. Kathryn Flanagan has been appointed the Deputy Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md. The Institute is the science operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2018. Dr. Flanagan had been the Institute's acting Deputy Director since January 2012. "Kathy lives and breathes space science, and has enormous experience working with NASA and the Science Mission Directorate," said Institute...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA said it has received the second of four main instruments for its James Webb Space Telescope, the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope. The Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) will help enable the James Webb to accurately point at the correct objects for it to observe. It is packaged together as a single unit with the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) science instrument. The instrument arrived on July 30 at...

The faint, lumpy glow given off by the very first objects in the universe may have been detected with the best precision yet, using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. These faint objects might be wildly massive stars or voracious black holes. They are too far away to be seen individually, but Spitzer has captured new, convincing evidence of what appears to be the collective pattern of their infrared light. The observations help confirm the first objects were numerous in quantity and furiously...

WASHINGTON, June 7, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The faint, lumpy glow from the very first objects in the universe may have been detected with the best precision yet using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The objects could be wildly massive stars or voracious black holes. They are too far away to be seen individually, but Spitzer has captured new, convincing evidence of what appears to be the collective pattern of their infrared light. (Logo:...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) announced on Monday that it will be giving two telescopes as big as the Hubble Space Telescope to NASA. The 7.9-feet mirror telescopes have 100 times the field of view of the Hubble, according to David Spergel, a Princeton astrophysicist and co-chair of the National Academies advisory panel on astronomy and astrophysics. If used as originally intended, NASA official Michael Moore told the Washington Post that the...

NASA officials have announced plans to use the moon like a mirror in order to allow them to see the forthcoming transit of Venus across the face of the sun on June 5 and 6, the U.S. space agency announced in a Friday press release. The seemingly unorthodox technique is necessary because the Hubble Space Telescope, which will be used to observe the transit, cannot look at the sun directly. To work around that issue, astronomers will be pointing the telescope at our planet's satellite, using...

The following is a statement from NASA's Chief Scientist, Waleed Abdalati, on the Space Telescope Science Institute naming its astronomical database the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). MAST holds science data from the Hubble Space Telescope and 14 other NASA missions. "The Space Telescope Science Institute's decision to name its database for Senator Mikulski is an honor very much deserved. She is a tremendous advocate and supporter for science, NASA and the...