Latest Netherlands Institute for Space Research Stories

ESA's Herschel Space Observatory has revealed the chemical fingerprints of potential life-enabling organic molecules in the Orion Nebula, a nearby stellar nursery in our Milky Way galaxy. This detailed spectrum, obtained with the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HIFI) - one of Herschel's three innovative instruments - demonstrates the gold mine of information that Herschel-HIFI will provide on how organic molecules form in space. The spectrum, one of the first to be obtained with...

ESA's Herschel observatory is back to full operation following the reactivation of its HiFi instrument. HiFi, having been offline for 160 days while engineers investigated an unexpected problem in the electronic system, is now perfectly placed to resume its study of forming stars and planets.HiFi, the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared, was built specifically to observe water in a variety of celestial objects. Its first observation, on 22 June 2009, showed that it was performing...

The back up system of HIFI, the state of the art Dutch space instrument on ESA's Herschel space telescope, has been switched on successfully. Due to an unexpected voltage peak in the electronic system HIFI has been inactive for more than 160 days, but on Thursday evening 14 January Mission Control in Darmstadt confirmed that HIFI is now fully capable of performing groundbreaking observations in space again. The coming three years HIFI, built under the supervision of SRON Netherlands Institute...

Using data from the SCIAMACHY instrument aboard ESA's environmental satellite Envisat, scientists have determined that the carbon monoxide hovering over Australia during the wildfire season largely originated from South American wildfires some 13,000 kilometres away.Using SCIAMACHY, Annemieke Gloudemans from SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research and her colleagues at Utrecht University, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) witnessed...

ESA -- The SCIAMACHY sensor aboard Envisat has performed the first space-based measurements of the global distribution of near-surface methane, one of the most important greenhouse gases. As reported in Thursday's issue of Science Express, the results show larger than expected emissions across tropical land regions. The report concerns work carried out by the Institute of Environmental Physics (IUP) at the University of Heidelberg in cooperation with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological...