Heavens

Electrically charged lunar dust near shadowed craters can get lofted above the surface and jump over the shadowed region, bouncing back and forth between sunlit areas on opposite sides, according to new calculations by NASA scientists.

The research is being led by Michael Collier at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., as part of the Dynamic Response of the Environment At the Moon (DREAM) team in partnership with the NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI), managed at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 15, 2013 — Members of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover ChemCam team will present more than two dozen posters and talks next week during the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

While performing an extensive X-ray survey of our galaxy's central regions, NASA's Swift satellite has uncovered the previously unknown remains of a shattered star. Designated G306.3.9 after the coordinates of its sky position, the new object ranks among the youngest-known supernova remnants in our Milky Way galaxy.

A massive backplane that will hold the primary mirror of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope nearly motionless while it peers into space is another step closer to completion with the recent assembly of the support structure's wings.

On March 15, 2013, at 2:54 a.m. EDT, the sun erupted with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME), a solar phenomenon that can send billions of tons of solar particles into space and can reach Earth one to three days later and affect electronic systems in satellites and on the ground. Experimental NASA research models, based on observations from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and ESA/NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, show that the CME left the sun at speeds of around 900 miles per second, which is a fairly fast speed for CMEs.

Distant, dust-filled galaxies were bursting with newborn stars much earlier in cosmic history than previously thought, according to newly published research.

So-called "starburst galaxies" produce stars at the equivalent of a thousand new suns per year. Now, astronomers have found starbursts that were churning out stars when the universe was just a billion years old.

Mindfulness is a form of meditation therapy focused on exercising 'attentiveness'. Depression is often rooted in a downward spiral of negative feelings and worries. Once a person learns to more quickly recognise these feelings and thoughts, he or she can intervene before depression sinks in.

In the swirling canopy of Jupiter's atmosphere, cloudless patches are so exceptional that the big ones get the special name "hot spots." Exactly how these clearings form and why they're only found near the planet's equator have long been mysteries. Now, using images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists have found new evidence that hot spots in Jupiter's atmosphere are created by a Rossby wave, a pattern also seen in Earth's atmosphere and oceans.

TORONTO, ON (date) – A team of international scientists including a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astrophysicist has made the most detailed examination yet of the atmosphere of a Jupiter-size like planet beyond our solar system.

The finding provides astrophysicists with additional insight into how planets are formed.

A young exoplanet, orbiting a star known as HR 8799, has water and carbon monoxide in its atmosphere—but not methane—researchers say. Their findings suggest that a particular planet-forming mechanism, known as core accretion, brought the exoplanet, called HR 8799c, into existence.

HR 8799c is a gas giant, with about seven times the mass of Jupiter, and astronomers have been debating whether similar planets form via this core accretion process or by another possible mechanism, known as gravitational instability.

TORONTO, ON (11 March 2013) – A team of astronomers, including Quinn Konopacky of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto, has made the most detailed examination yet of the atmosphere of a Jupiter-like planet beyond our Solar System.

According to Konopacky, "We have been able to observe this planet in unprecedented detail because of the advanced instrumentation we are using on the Keck II telescope, our ground-breaking observing and data-processing techniques, and because of the nature of the planetary system."

Researchers have successfully created a magnetic soliton – a nano-sized, spinning droplet that was first theorized 35 years ago. These solitons have implications for the creation of magnetic, spin-based computers.

Solitons are waves, localized in space, that preserve their size and momentum. They were first observed in water. Solitons composed of light have proved useful for long distance, high speed information transmission. But droplet solitons had never been observed in a magnetic environment, although scientists believed they could exist there.

The six science instruments that comprise the Particles and Fields Package that will characterize the solar wind and ionosphere of Mars have been integrated aboard NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft. The spacecraft is on track for launch later this year.

The Solar Wind Electron Analyzer (SWEA) was the last of the six instruments to be delivered, and was integrated late last week at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colo. SWEA measures the properties of electrons at Mars, one electron at a time, and can process up to one million events per second.

System 96P has been moving through the Coral Sea near northeastern Australia over the last couple of days, and today, March 14, NASA's Aqua satellite captured the storm as it matured into Tropical Storm Tim.

On March 13, it was announced the most vigorous bursts of star birth in the cosmos took place much earlier than previously thought - results now published in a set of papers in Nature and the Astrophysical Journal.