You are browsing the archive for Current Research.
15 September 2008
First image of another planet around a sun-like star!
Check it out – this is probably the first image of an extra solar planet around a Sun-like star! More specifically, the image above shows both the primary and companion of the star 1RXSJ160929.1-210524 (romantic, eh?), imaged at the Gemini North Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The companion is about 8 times the mass of Jupiter, and has a radius about 17% of the Sun’s. One of the reasons …
7 August 2008
Phoenix Update: Pondering Perchlorates
Since we last checked in on Phoenix, the team has had made remarkable progress in investigating the lander’s local environment. The team has: – Finished the mission-success panorama – Officially detected water ice in TEGA – Investigated the bizzarely clumpy and sticky nature of the landing site’s soil – Observed changes in the ice deposits under the lander – Continued to monitor the summer polar weather – Received a mission …
4 August 2008
Guest Blog: Lakes on Titan
So, Saturn is in the news again, and I’d be remiss in my bloggerly duties if I didn’t mention it. Or, rather Titan is in the news again. See, it has liquid on its surface. But wait, you say, didn’t we already know that? Well, kind of. What had happened is that the radar aboard Cassini showed that there were these dark spots near the poles. Now, interpreting radar is …
17 July 2008
New insights into ancient water on Mars
The evidence for a warmer, wetter ancient Mars just keeps piling up! In 2 new papers, the team for the CRISM spectrometer onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has reported new evidence for water on the surface of ancient Mars, based on the ubiquitous presence of water-bearing minerals. Universe Today has a great post up on the findings, so I won’t repeat too much of Nancy’s explanation. In brief, the CRISM …
3 July 2008
What shape is the solar system?
A cool bit of news from beyond Mars this week: Voyager 2 has relayed new info on the shape of the solar system! New data from the spacecraft, published yesterday in Nature, indicates that Voyager 2 passed through the termination shock in the heliosphere back in August/September of last year. Without the jargon, that means that Voyager 2 reached the location where the solar wind goes from super-sonic to sub-sonic, …
26 June 2008
Does martian soil contain evidence for rain?
There’s a news story floating around on the net about a new study on soil at the Viking, Pathfinder, and MER landing sites that’s coming out later this month. The study, by UC Berkeley prof Ronald Amundson and his team of terrestrial geologists, suggests that the chemical profiles in the soils at the landing sites may have been the result of precipitation (i.e. water rain). Trench at Meridiani (Unmanned Spaceflight) …
