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Japan's Hayabusa made an exciting fiery return around 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) in the Woomera Prohibited Area of South Australia. In the video you'll see a little speck of light ahead of the falling debris: that’s the sample return canister with, hopefully, some precious goods aboard – samples from asteroid Itokawa. The canister separated about three hours before reaching Earth, and returned to Earth via parachute. The canister has been recovered, and will be taken to Japan where scientists will open it to find out if there is anything inside.
This image shows the Hayabusa capsule after landing with its parachute attached. Image credit: JAXA
Click the Skylog Heading for more information on this topic.
The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) expects its Asteroid
sample return capsule to boomerang back to Earth on June 13, 2010. The spacecraft visited a near-Earth asteroid, Itokawa, five years ago and has logged
about 2 billion kilometers (1.25 billion miles) since its launch in May
2003. With the return of the Hayabusa capsule, targeted for June 13 at
Australia’s remote Woomera Test Range in South Australia, JAXA will
have concluded a remarkable mission of exploration — one in which NASA
scientists and engineers are playing a contributing role. To learn more click here.
NASA's Swift satellite detected an active black hole (indicated by the
white circle) in NGC 7319, one of the galaxies in the grouping known as
Stephan's Quintet.
Supermassive black holes appear to light up with hard X-rays when their
parent galaxies decide to merge, according to a survey by NASA's
peeping Swift Satellite. Known asactive galactic nuclei, Just 1 percent of super massive black holes currently put on such exhibitionist behavior by giving off as much as 10 billion times the sun's energy.
Just Imagine- a humanoid robot on the moon! But before the moon, R2 will stretch its limbs aboard the ISS this fall.
Project M is a proposed project to land an operational humanoid robot
on the moon in 1000 days (M is the Roman numeral for 1000). The
humanoid will travel to the moon on a small lander fueled by green
propellants, liquid methane and liquid oxygen. It will perform a
precision, autonomous landing, avoiding any hazards or obstacles on the
surface. Upon landing the robot will deploy and walk on the surface
performing a multitude of tasks focused on demonstrating engineering
tasks such as maintenance and construction; performing science of
opportunity (i.e. using existing sensors on the robot or small science
instruments); and simple student experiments.
The mission is about inspiration, streamlining agency practices and
processes and using unconventional partnerships, and building a
workforce and demonstrating technologies to enable the continuation of
human exploration beyond low earth orbit. While the project is not fully funded nor vetted at the agency level,
much progress has already been made by leveraging and coalescing
existing, funded technology work; by forming innovative partnerships;
and by a small project team focusing on fast iterative design, test,
and execution. While the project is not fully funded nor vetted at the agency level,
much progress has already been made by leveraging and coalescing
existing, funded technology work; by forming innovative partnerships;
and by a small project team focusing on fast iterative design, test,
and execution.
A massive runaway star has been spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope
racing away from the its home stellar nursery after being kicked out by
some of its much heftier stellar siblings. he future outlook for this tough-luck star seemingly doesn't improve:
Paul Crowther of the University of Sheffield, a member of the team who
made the observations of 30 Dor #016, said the wayward star will
continue to streak across space and will eventually end its life in a titanic supernova explosion, likely leaving behind a remnant blackhole.
The fugitive already appears to have traveled 375 light-years from its
birthplace: a star cluster called R136 deep in the Tarantula Nebula. Astronomers caught the stellar runaway in Hubble Space Telescope data taken shortly after the last space shuttle servicing mission in May 2009. The team chose the star as a target to help calibrate the newly
installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), an instrument designed to
look at the light signatures—or spectra—of very distant, faint objects.
