Lifeboat Foundation

Four lasers beam out from one of the Unit Telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), guiding your eyes to the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds beneath them.

The Four Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF) shines four 22-watt laser beams into the sky to create artificial guide stars by making sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere glow so that they look just like real stars. The artificial stars allow the adaptive optics systems to compensate for the blurring caused by the Earth’s atmosphere and so that the telescope can create sharp images.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared footage from the European Space Agency’s Rosetta satellite, which passed by Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in 2016. The archived footage shows spectacular sights from space, and some of the most majestic aspects of our solar system.

Amazing comparison of the size of the universe.

Translated.

Scheduled for first light in the 2020s, a powerful new class of giant telescopes will study the Universe in more detail than ever before — as long as their adaptive optics systems can sharpen their view. ESO’s Laser Systems group is currently undertaking field tests with a specialised laser at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, at La Palma on the Canary Islands. One of their goals is to make laser guide stars even brighter for large and extremely large telescopes, such as ESO’s ELT and the Giant Magellan Telescope. To find out more, we spoke to Domenico Bonaccini Calia, a physicist from ESO’s Laser Systems Department with over 20 years of experience.

STOCKHOLM (GomSpace PR) — As part of a mission to demonstrate interlink communication on nanosatellite tandem formation flights and data retrieval, including surveillance of the Arctic area, the Danish nanosatellite specialist GomSpace launched two nanosatellites in February.

Twelve weeks later, GomSpace for the first time showed the possibility of live data capture from the two nanosatellites in space at a press conference held in Aalborg, Denmark. At the same time, the press conference marked the official transition to the so-called demonstration phase, following the mission’s test phase. The latter has thus been successfully completed, and the mission is now ready to carry out its scheduled tasks.

On February 2, 2018, GomSpace launched two nanosatellites mounted on the Chinese missile Long March 2D from a launch station in the Gobi Desert. The objective of the two nanosatellites, based on GomSpace’s 6U platform, is in part to monitor the Arctic area. It is an area where ice has melted significantly in recent years, meaning that the area sees more and more activity in the shape of aircraft and ships, researchers and tourists.

Continue reading “GomSpace Successfully Commissions GOMX-4 Nanosats” »

Putting the commercial in commercial space.

A random-code technique has been used at Arecibo to obtain delay-Doppler radar images of the full disk of Mercury. Anomalously bright features were found at the north and south poles. The north polar feature is oblong (4° by 8°) and offset from the pole. The smaller south polar feature is mostly confined to the floor of the crater Chao Meng-Fu. The polar locations and radar properties of these features indicate that they may be produced by volume scattering in ice. The images also reveal a variety of more subdued reflectivity features ranging in size from hundreds to thousands of kilometers; some of these appear to have an impact origin.

A moderate geomagnetic storm kicked up in Earth’s skies Friday morning (April 20), bringing green and rare electric-blue auroras that stretched as far south as Indiana.

The space-weather news site Spaceweather.com reported that an “interplanetary shock wave” hit Earth’s magnetic field at about 3:50 a.m. EDT (2350 on April 19 GMT), quadrupling the intensity of the flow of particles streaming from the sun toward Earth, called the solar wind. The incoming wave of material resulted in a G2-level, or moderate, geomagnetic storm, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). These types of storms can cause power grid fluctuations and have some impact on radio communications. [See Spectacular Photos of Auroras from Space]

And they also cause enhanced auroras. This storm led to auroras possibly reaching through Canada and as far south as New York, Wisconsin and Washington state in the U.S., the SWPC said.

Continue reading “‘Interplanetary Shock Wave’ Spawns Electric-Blue Auroras” »

The new results obtained with GIRAFFE on the VLT seem to show that collisions and merging are important in the formation and evolution of galaxies. Here, such a collision is shown in this artist’s impression.