Category Astronomy/Space

An artist’s impression depicts the separation of the ExoMars 2016 entry, descent and landing demonstrator module, named Schiaparelli, from the Trace Gas Orbiter, and heading for Mars

European-Russian spacecraft were on course for Mars Monday after crucial deep-space manoeuvres in preparation for a daring mission to find evidence of life on the Red Planet. The Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) mothership despatched the tiny Mars lander called Schiaparelli Sunday on a 3-day trek to the Martian surface in a key phase of the joint ExoMars project. There were nervous moments for ground controllers when TGO, designed to enter Mars’ orbit to analyse its atmosphere for life, stopped sending status updates for about an hour before coming back online.

In the early hours of Monday, the TGO successfully complet...

Optical resolution is the ability of an imaging system to distinguish between closely spaced objects. In the picture, we show two points separated by the Rayleigh’s limit, as observed in the experiment. Credit: Martin Paúr – Palacký University

The resolution of an optical system (like a telescope or a camera) is limited by the Rayleigh criterion. An international team, led by Complutense University of Madrid, has broken this limit, showing that it is not a fundamental curse. This opens the door to considerable improvement in resolution and could force the revision of Optics textbooks. This research is the culmination of a thrilling race between four groups of scientists around the world.

An ideal optical system would resolve a point perfectly as a point...

Bang! A new moon crater appeared between Oct. 25, 2012, and April 21, 2013. At 12 meters (40 feet) wide, the crater is not hard to spot in the image, but the starburst pattern of ejected debris is elusive to trace. Image by NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

The Moon’s surface is being “gardened” – churned by small impacts – more than 100 times faster than scientists previously thought. This means that surface features believed to be young are perhaps even younger than assumed. It also means that any structures placed on the Moon as part of human expeditions will need better protection. This new discovery comes from >7 years of high-resolution lunar images studied by a team of scientists from Arizona State University and Cornell University...

Artist’s impression of the dust disk and a forming planet around TW Hydrae. Credit: NAOJ

A number of extrasolar planets have been found in the past two decades and now researchers agree that planets can have a wide variety of characteristics. However, it is still unclear how this diversity emerges. Especially, there is still debate about how the icy giant planets, such as Uranus and Neptune, form. To take a close look at the planet formation site, a research team led by Takashi Tsukagoshi at Ibaraki University, Japan, observed the young star TW Hydrae. This star, estimated to be 10 million years old, is one of the closest young stars to the Earth...