Tag: Astrophysics
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NASA resumes JWST vibration testing
A clean tent is lowered over the James Webb Space Telescope, with its wings folded back in launch configuration, before the start of vibration testing in November. Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn Vibration testing on the James Webb Space Telescope, the multibillion-dollar successor to Hubble, has resumed after engineers traced a problem that cropped up last month…
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NASA picks IXPE: Space telescope will study X-ray fingerprints of black holes
An artist’s conception shows the accretion disk around an active black hole. (NASA Illustration) NASA is committing $188 million to build and launch a space telescope to observe patterns in the X-ray radiation emanating from black holes, neutron stars and pulsars. The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, or IXPE, was chosen from a field of three…
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Engineers examine unexpected readings from JWST shake test
The James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror, composed of 18 individual segments, is seen inside a clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center earlier this year. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center NASA says engineers are diagnosing the source of “anomalous readings” during a recent vibration test of the sensitive optics and sensors at the…
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China lofts pulsar navigation demo satellite
A Long March 11 rocket blasts off from the Jiuquan space center at 2342 GMT (6:42 p.m. EST) Wednesday. Credit: CCTV China launched an innovative satellite Wednesday that will look for X-ray signals from pulsars, the fast-spinning super-dense remnants of collapsed stars, to determine its exact location in space. The experimental pulsar navigation mission carries…
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Potentially-habitable planet discovered around nearest star Proxima Centauri
An artist’s impression of what the surface of Proxima b might look like. Notice the red sky around the star and the darker sky elsewhere. Image: ESO/M Kornmesser. A planet with at least 1.3 times the mass of Earth has been discovered orbiting within the habitable zone of the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima…
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Japan’s Hitomi observatory made cosmic discovery before failing
The Perseus galaxy cluster is filled with hot X-ray-emitting gas, as seen in this image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Astronomers using the Soft X-ray Spectrometer aboard the Hitomi satellite have, for the first time, mapped the motion of this gas and determined its velocity structure across a large part of the cluster. The square…
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LISA Pathfinder success bolsters plan for gravitational wave observatory
Artist’s concept of the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft. Credit: ESA–C. Carreau Europe’s LISA Pathfinder mission — a fundamental physics lab launched last year to a point a million miles from Earth — has demonstrated the mind-boggling technology required for a future space-based observatory to listen for faint, low-frequency vibrations emitted by invisible objects in the most…
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Kepler adds 1,284 exoplanets to its total
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION This artist’s concept depicts select planetary discoveries made to date by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Credits: NASA/W. Stenzel A statistical analysis of data collected by NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope during its initial mission shows a better than 99 percent chance that 1,284 worlds previously classified as “candidates”…
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Japan gives up on rescuing black hole observatory
Artist’s concept of Japan’s Hitomi satellite. Credit: JAXA/Akihiro Ikeshita Japan’s space agency says it has ceased efforts to rescue a failed X-ray astronomy satellite after it spun out of control and broke apart in orbit, declaring the nearly $400 million mission lost two months after its launch. Controllers on the ground lost contact with the…
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Attitude control failures led to break-up of Japanese astronomy satellite
Artist’s concept of Japan’s Hitomi satellite. Credit: JAXA/Akihiro Ikeshita Japan’s Hitomi X-ray observatory was beset by a series of attitude control problems March 26 that caused the satellite to spin out of control and shed sizable chunks of its power-generating solar panels or deployable telescope, according to engineers analyzing fragments of telemetry data sent to…