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Einstein Was Right, Astrophysicists Say
Researchers have confirmed a long-held prediction of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, via observations of a binary-pulsar star system. Eclipses in a unique system of two dead stars, called pulsars, has shown that one of the pair is 'wobbling' in space - just like a spinning top. The effect, called precession, is precisely as predicted by Albert Einstein and is thus a new and exciting confirmation of his theory.

MESSENGER Settles Old Debates And Makes New Discoveries At Mercury
Scientists have argued about the origins of Mercury's smooth plains and the source of its magnetic field for more than 30 years. Now, analyses of data from the January 2008 flyby of the planet by the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft have shown that volcanoes were involved in plains formation and suggest that its magnetic field is actively produced in the planet's core.

Phoenix To Bake Ice-Rich Sample Next Week
The next sample delivered to NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander's Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) will be ice-rich. A team of engineers and scientists assembled to assess TEGA after a short circuit was discovered in the instrument has concluded that another short circuit could occur when the oven is used again.

Asteroid Impacts On Earth: A Protection Plan
A century ago this week, an event in far-off Siberia rang a cosmic wake-up call for Earth. That explosive event over remote Tunguska is generally viewed by scientists as a large space rock that pierced through the atmosphere of Siberia, then detonated to flatten some 2,000 square kilometers of trees.

First Measurements Of The Solar Wind Termination Shock By Voyager 2 Spacecraft
Space physicists report that the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which has been traveling outward from the sun for 31 years, has made the first direct observations of the solar wind termination shock, according to an article in the journal Nature.

Exploding Asteroid Theory Strengthened By New Evidence Located In Ohio, Indiana
Was the course of life on the planet altered 12,900 years ago by a giant comet exploding over Canada? New evidence suggests the answer is affirmative. The timing attached to this theory of about 12,900 years ago is consistent with the known disappearances in North America of the wooly mammoth population and the first distinct human society to inhabit the continent, known as the Clovis civilization.

Mercury's Surface Dominated By Volcanism And Iron-deficiency
Multispectral data on the composition of rock untis of the surface of Mercury show a widespread role for volcanism and an apparent deficiency in iron in the rocks' minerals.

Mining For Molecules In The Milky Way
Scientists are prospecting in a rich molecular cloud in our Milky Way Galaxy. They seek to discover new, complex molecules in interstellar space that may be precursors to life. As molecules rotate and vibrate, they emit radio waves at specific frequencies. Each molecule has a unique pattern of such frequencies, called spectral lines, that constitutes a "fingerprint" identifying that molecule. Laboratory tests can determine the pattern of spectral lines that identifies a specific molecule.

Volcanic Activity Shaped Mercury After All
Planetary geologists have determined that volcanism played a central role in forming Mercury's surface. The evidence of volcanic activity, published in Science, lends important insights into Mercury's geologic history.

Voyager Squashes View Of Solar System
Scientists using data from NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft have observed the bubble of solar wind surrounding the solar system is not round, but has a squashed shape, according to recent data published as part of a series of papers in this week's (July 3) Nature.

First Images Of Solar System's Invisible Frontier
An instrument aboard NASA's STEREO spacecraft unexpectedly detected particles from the edge of the solar system last year, allowing UC Berkeley scientists to map for the first time the energized particles in the region where the hot solar wind slams into the cold interstellar medium. The region, at about 100 AU, is invisible to other telescopes, but can be mapped by detecting energetic neutral atoms, largely hydrogen.

Hubble Sees Stars And A Stripe In Celestial Fireworks
A delicate ribbon of gas floats eerily in our galaxy. A contrail from an alien spaceship? A jet from a black-hole? Actually this image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, is a very thin section of a supernova remnant caused by a stellar explosion that occurred more than 1,000 years ago.

What Hit Siberia 100 Years Ago? Tunguska Event Still Puzzles Scientists
The year is 1908, and it's just after seven in the morning. A man is sitting on the front porch of a trading post at Vanavara in Siberia. Little does he know, in a few moments, he will be hurled from his chair and the heat will be so intense he will feel as though his shirt is on fire. That's how the Tunguska event felt 40 miles from ground zero.

SOHO Discovers Its 1,500th Comet
The ESA/NASA SOHO spacecraft has just discovered its 1,500th comet, making it more successful than all other comet discoverers throughout history put together. Not bad for a spacecraft that was designed as a solar physics mission.

If The Large Hadron Collider Produced A Microscopic Black Hole, It Probably Wouldn't Matter
Particle colliders creating black holes that could devour the Earth. Sounds like a great Hollywood script. But, according to UC Santa Barbara Physics Professor Steve Giddings, it's pure fiction. Giddings has co-authored a paper documenting his study of the safety of microscopic black holes that might possibly be produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is nearing completion in Europe.

Cluster Satellites Listen To The Sounds Of Earth
The first thing an alien race is likely to hear from Earth is chirps and whistles, a bit like R2-D2, the robot from Star Wars. In reality, they are the sounds that accompany the aurora. Now ESA's Cluster mission is showing scientists how to understand this emission and, in the future, search for alien worlds by listening for their sounds.

Cassini To Earth: 'Mission Accomplished, But New Questions Await!'
NASA's Cassini mission is closing one chapter of its journey at Saturn and embarking on a new one with a two-year mission that will address new questions and bring it closer to two of its most intriguing targets -- Titan and Enceladus.

Phoenix Scrapes To Icy Soil In Wonderland
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander scraped to icy soil in the "Wonderland" area on Thursday, June 26, confirming that surface soil, subsurface soil and icy soil can be sampled at a single trench.

A Quark Star? Super-luminous Stellar Explosion Observed
Astronomers recently announced that they have found a novel explanation for a rare type of super-luminous stellar explosion that may have produced a new type of object known as a quark star.

Asteroid-hunting Satellite A World First
Canada is building the world's first space telescope designed to detect and track asteroids as well as satellites. Called NEOSSat, this spacecraft will provide a significant improvement in surveillance of asteroids that pose a collision hazard with Earth and innovative technologies for tracking satellites in orbit high above our planet.

Phoenix Mars Lander Returns Treasure Trove For Science
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander performed its first wet chemistry experiment on Martian soil flawlessly yesterday, returning a wealth of data that for Phoenix scientists was like winning the lottery.

Evidence Of Massive Asteroid Impact On Mars Supported By Computer Simulations
The dramatic differences between the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars have puzzled scientists for 30 years. One of the proposed explanations -- a massive asteroid impact -- now has strong support from computer simulations carried out by two groups of researchers.

Largest Crater In Solar System Revealed By NASA Spacecraft
New analysis of Mars' terrain using NASA spacecraft observations reveals what appears to be by far the largest impact crater ever found in the solar system.

Phoenix Mars Lander Puts Soil In Chemistry Lab, Team Discusses Next Steps
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander placed a sample of Martian soil in the spacecraft's wet chemistry laboratory June 25 for the first time. Results from that instrument, part of Phoenix's Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, are expected to provide the first measurement of the acidity or alkalinity of the planet's soil.

Moon-Bound NASA Spacecraft Passes Major Preflight Tests
Engineering teams are conducting final checkouts of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, known as LCROSS, that will take a significant step forward in the search for water on the moon.

Mars Air Once Had Moisture, New Soil Analysis Says
A new analysis of Martian soil data suggests that there was once enough water in the planet's atmosphere for dew to hit the ground, leaving tell-tale signs of its interaction with the planet's surface. The study's conclusion breaks from the more dominant view that the liquid water that once existed during the red planet's infancy came mainly in the form of upwelling groundwater.

Phoenix Lander Prepares For Microscopy, Wet Chemistry On Mars
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has delivered a scoop of Martian soil from the "Snow White" trenches to the optical microscope for analysis tomorrow, June 24, the 29th Martian day of the mission, or Sol 29.

Celestial Clues Hint At Eclipse In Homer's Odyssey
Among countless other debates about Homer's Odyssey -- not the least of which is whether the entire poem can be attributed to Homer himself -- is whether Odysseus returns home to experience a total solar eclipse. But scientists believe they have found astronomical references in the Odyssey that provide corroborating evidence of this celestial event.

Radio Telescopes Reveal Unseen Galactic Cannibalism
Using radio telescopes, astronomers have solved a mystery of how the gigantic black holes at the cores of active galaxies known as Seyfert galaxies get their "food." While visible-light images showed little evidence that these galaxies had any interaction with their neighbors, the radio-telescope images revealed that the galaxies are snacking on their neighbors, and the "meal" ultimately reaches the black hole.

Protons Partner With Neutrons More Often Than With Other Protons
Fast-moving protons are much more likely to pair up with fast-moving neutrons than with other protons in the nuclei of atoms, according to a recent experiment. The research confirms a previous theoretical prediction by a Penn State physicist. The theory and its experimental confirmation show that the high-energy interactions can be used to make future discoveries in order to understand the structure of nuclear systems, from light nuclei to massive neutron stars.

Phoenix Mars Lander Delivers Soil Sample To Microscope
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander Saturday beamed back images showing that Phoenix's Robotic Arm successfully sprinkled soil onto the delivery port of the lander's Optical Microscope.

Newly Born Twin Stars Are Far From Identical
The analysis of the youngest pair of identical twin stars yet discovered has revealed surprising differences in brightness, surface temperature and possibly even in size, suggesting that the stars formed at significantly different times rather than simultaneously as generally assumed.

Phoenix Mars Lander Confirms Frozen Water On Red Planet
Scientists relishing confirmation of water ice near the surface beside NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander anticipate even bigger discoveries from the robotic mission in the weeks ahead.

Saturn’s Secondary Aurora Is Much More Like Jupiter’s In Origin Than It Is The Earth’s
Researchers have discovered a secondary aurora sparkling on Saturn and also started to unravel the mechanisms that drive the process. Their results show that Saturn's secondary aurora is much more like Jupiter's in origin than it is the Earth's.

Jules Verne Refuels The International Space Station
ESA's Jules Verne ATV was used for the first time yesterday to transfer in one step 811 kg of refueling propellant to the International Space Station while the two vehicles orbited Earth at 28 000 km/h. With this premiere for Europe, Jules Verne becomes the first western spaceship to succeed in refueling another space infrastructure in orbit.

Chemical Clues Point To Dusty Origin For Earth-like Planets
Higher than expected levels of sodium found in a 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite suggest that the dust clouds from which the building blocks of the Earth and neighboring planets formed were much denser than previously supposed.

Bright Chunks At Phoenix Lander's Mars Site Must Have Been Ice
Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it.

Slimmer Milky Way Galaxy Revealed By New Measurements
The Milky Way Galaxy has lost weight. A lot of weight. About a trillion Suns' worth, according to an international team of scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II), whose discovery has broad implications for our understanding of the Milky Way.

Protecting Muscles Of Astronauts
As astronaut Garrett Reisman adjusts to Earth's gravity after three months in space, a University of Kentucky physiologist is continuing his tests on a 50-year-old drug used for liver treatments as a means of helping astronauts perform their work during space walks.

Black Holes Have Simple Feeding Habits
The biggest black holes may feed just like the smallest ones, according to data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes. This discovery supports the implication of Einstein's relativity theory that black holes of all sizes have similar properties, and will be useful for predicting the properties of a conjectured new class of black holes.

Phoenix Makes First Trench In Science Preserve
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander began digging in an area called "Wonderland" early Tuesday, taking its first scoop of soil from a polygonal surface feature within the "national park" region that mission scientists have been preserving for science.

NASA Mars Lander To Dig; Team Probes Flash Memory
NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission generated an unusually high volume of spacecraft housekeeping data on Tuesday causing the loss of some non-critical science data. Phoenix engineers are analyzing why this anomaly occurred. The science team is planning spacecraft activities for Thursday that will not rely on Phoenix storing science data overnight but will make use of multiple communication relays to gain extra data quantity.

Phoenix Lander Bakes Sample, Arm Digs Deeper
One of the ovens on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander continued baking its first sample of Martian soil over the weekend, while the Robotic Arm dug deeper into the soil to learn more about white material first revealed on June 3.

NASA Finds New Type Of Comet Dust Mineral
NASA researchers and scientists from the United States, Germany and Japan have found a new mineral in material that likely came from a comet. The mineral, a manganese silicide named Brownleeite, was discovered within an interplanetary dust particle, or IDP, that appears to have originated from comet 26P/Grigg-Skjellerup. The comet originally was discovered in 1902 and reappears every 5 years.

NASA Plans To Visit The Sun
For more than 400 years, astronomers have studied the sun from afar. Now NASA has decided to go there. The name of the mission is Solar Probe+. It's a heat-resistant spacecraft designed to plunge deep into the sun's atmosphere where it can sample solar wind and magnetism first hand.

Trio Of Super-Earths: Harvest Of Low-mass Exoplanets Discovered With HARPS
European astronomers have announced a remarkable breakthrough in the field of extra-solar planets. Using the HARPS instrument at the ESO La Silla Observatory, they have found a triple system of super-Earths around the star HD 40307. Moreover, looking at their entire sample studied with HARPS, the astronomers count a total of 45 candidate planets with a mass below 30 Earth masses and an orbital period shorter than 50 days. This implies that one solar-like star out of three harbours such planets.

NASA Tests Lunar Robots And Spacesuits On Earthen Moonscape
Conditions on the moon will be harsher, but prototype NASA robotic vehicles braved sand storms and unprecedented temperature swings this month on sand dunes near Moses Lake, Wash., to prepare for future lunar expeditions. Teams from seven NASA centers and several universities conducted the tests from June 2-13.

Radiation Testing: Northwestern Transistors On Space Station
Transistors based on a new kind of material created by Northwestern University researchers have been lifted into outer space on the space shuttle Endeavour and attached to the outside of the International Space Station for radiation testing. The transistors, which used a new kind of gate dielectric material called a self-assembled nanodielectric, will remain there for a year as part of a NASA materials experiment to see how they and other materials hold up to the harsh space environment.

Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for Requirements for Amateur Rocket Activities