Venus Express has revealed a planet of extraordinarily changeable and extremely large-scale weather. Bright hazes appear in a matter of days, reaching from the south pole to the low southern latitudes and disappearing just as quickly. Such ‘global weather’, unlike anything on Earth, has given scientists a new mystery to solve.
ESA PR 10-2008. NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis, which successfully delivered ESA’s Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station, has safely returned to Earth with its crew of seven. Landing was at 14:07 UTC (15:07 CET) on 20 February at Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
Gaps in the soup of high-energy particles near the orbits of two of Saturn’s tiny moons indicate that Saturn may be surrounded by undiscovered, near-invisible partial rings. A paper in the February issue of the journal Icarus suggests that the larger saturnian moons may not be the only ones contributing material to Saturn’s ring system.
Despite the incredible diversity of Saturn’s icy moons, theirs is a story of great interaction. Some are pock-marked, some seemingly dirty, others pristine, one spongy, one two-faced, some still spewing with activity and some seeming to be captured from the far reaches of the solar system. Yet many of them have a common thread - black ‘stuff’ coating their surfaces.
Astronauts have successfully completed a spacewalk to install the Columbus external experiment facilities, SOLAR and the European Technology Exposure Facility. The facilities will now be activated and checked out before starting to collect the first data later this month.
Mars Express took snapshots of Candor Chasma, a valley in the northern part of Valles Marineris, as it was in orbit above the region on 6 July 2006.
“We are proud as Germans and Europeans that we could contribute to the ISS with Columbus. Europe now has a permanent basis for research in space,” highlighted German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the beginning of her in-flight call with ESA astronauts Hans Schlegel and Léopold Eyharts in Berlin earlier today.
ESA astronaut Hans Schlegel today completed his first ever spacewalk. The second spacewalk of the STS-122 Shuttle mission lasted six hours 45 minutes.
With Europe’s Columbus laboratory safely attached to the International Space Station, this is a good time to come up with new ideas for experiments that can be carried out onboard the station to demonstrate the effects of weightlessness to young students.
Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new Cassini data. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.
European scientists have developed the most accurate method yet for predicting the doses of radiation that astronauts will receive aboard the orbiting European laboratory module, Columbus, attached to the ISS this week.
The STS-122 and International Space Station crews are busy with tasks to activate the European Columbus laboratory. Attached to the Station during a spacewalk on Monday, Columbus’ hatch was opened for the first time at 15:08 CET this morning.
The European Columbus laboratory has completed its voyage to the International Space Station. Columbus was officially attached to the right side of the Harmony module at 22:44 CET this evening.
The European Columbus laboratory was officially attached to the International Space Station at 22:44 CET this evening. More later…
A spacewalk is underway outside the International Space Station to install the European Columbus laboratory. Astronauts Rex Walheim and Stanley Love officially started the spacewalk at 15:13 CET (14:13 UT). Follow the action live on NASA TV.
ESA PR 09-2008. With the Columbus mission well under way, the space station programme has assigned crews for the next flight opportunities. Belgian ESA astronaut Frank De Winne joins Expedition 19 and will spend six months on the ISS in 2009. In May 2009, he will fly together with Russian cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Robert Thirsk on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS.
