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Measured in straight flight, the spine-tailed swift is the fastest bird. It flies 170 km/h (106 mph). Second fastest is the Frigate, which reaches 150 km/h (94 mph). |
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Pluto-bound probe's Jupiter vista
Reads: 36 |
Posted by Thoth on Thursday, January 08, 2009 (CST)
 Jupiter proved ready for its close-up when the New Horizons spacecraft flew by earlier this year. New images and analyses of the massive planet have revealed surprising details of its atmosphere, rings and moons. They include never-seen-before observations of Jupiter: lightning displays at the poles, mysterious clumps embedded in its rings, and the first movie of volcanic eruption on its moon Io.
Scientist took advantage of the flyby, designed to give New Horizons a gravity boost and shorten its journey to Pluto, to learn more about the Jovian system, and to follow up on previous missions to the gas giant. "It was a very close flyby - three times closer than Cassini - and our first mission with really modern instruments," said Amy Simon-Miller, a planetary scientist at the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center.
"The imaging was spectacular," she said. The pictures, taken during the spacecraft's closest approach to Jupiter in February and March this year, were presented at the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in Orlando, Florida, in anticipation of their publication in the journal Science.
(Read More... Cosmology & Astronomy | Word Count: 930 | comments? | Score: 0) |
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Milky Way Much More Massive
Reads: 54 |
Posted by Thoth on Wednesday, January 07, 2009 (CST)
 Scientists have dramatically revised the mass of the Milky Way, saying our home galaxy is half again as heavy as previously thought. The Milky Way is now on par with the nearby Andromeda Galaxy in terms of heft. The Milky Way spins a lot faster than was thought, too.
Astronomers arrived at the new mass by using the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope to make detailed images of the galaxy's structure, measuring distances and motions of different areas of the Milky Way.
These high-precision measurements, presented here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, indicate that the galaxy's speed at the position of our solar system (at a distance of 28,000 light-years from the galactic center) is about 600,000 mph (970,000 kph) to 100,000 mph (160,000 kph) faster than previously thought.
(Read More... Cosmology & Astronomy | Word Count: 713 | comments? | Score: 0) |
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Is Saturn losing its rings?
Reads: 59 |
Posted by Thoth on Tuesday, January 06, 2009 (CST)
 The sixth planet from the sun, Saturn, is perhaps best known for its many rings, which consist of billions of particles of ice and rock. But throughout the next several months, if you look at Saturn with a telescope, you’ll see something strange – the rings seem to be disappearing.
That’s because about every 14 to 15 years, the tilt of the planet is such that we on Earth see the rings edge-on. In reality the rings are still there, but they appear nearly invisible from Earth.
The phenomenon, which stumped Galileo in the 1600s, is called a “ring plane crossing.” While the Earth has an equinox every six months, Saturn’s are more spaced out — in fact, it orbits the sun once every 29.5 years.
(Read More... Cosmology & Astronomy | Word Count: 380 | comments? | Score: 0) |
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Spirit and Opportunity rovers mark five years on Mars
Reads: 49 |
Posted by Thoth on Monday, January 05, 2009 (CST)
 The US space agency's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity this month mark their fifth anniversary on the Red Planet, where they have endured harsh conditions and revealed a deluge of information. The twin robots, which landed on Mars three weeks apart in January 2004, were initially expected to have just 90-day missions, but have since sent back to Earth a quarter-million images, toured mountains and craters and survived violent dust storms.
"The American taxpayer was told three months for each rover was the prime mission plan. The twins have worked almost 20 times that long," said NASA assistant administrator Ed Weiler in a statement. "That's an extraordinary return of investment in these challenging budgetary times."
The rovers, which along with 250,000 images have sent back to Earth some 36 gigabytes of data, have greatly advanced NASA's understanding of Mars' geology, including peeks into the planet's wet and habitable past.
(Read More... Cosmology & Astronomy | Word Count: 693 | comments? | Score: 0) |
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Gems show comet hit continent, scientists say
Reads: 111 |
Posted by Thoth on Saturday, January 03, 2009 (CST)
 Diamonds are generally considered a sign of love and devotion, but a thin layer of microscopic diamonds a couple of feet beneath the surface of North America represents a far more horrific tale - one of fire, flood and devastation that extinguished woolly mammoths and dealt a blow to early civilization, scientists reported today.
The nanodiamonds, so small that they are barely visible in an electron microscope, are thought to be remnants of a comet that hit North America 13,000 years ago - some 65 million years after the much larger collision that wiped out the dinosaurs.
According to the theory - which has its critics - as the comet broke apart, it rained fire over the entire continent, igniting the plains and forests and creating choking clouds of smoke.
(Read More... Cosmology & Astronomy | Word Count: 926 | comments? | Score: 5) |
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