SPACE.com – The desire to contact intelligentlife on other planets is much older than the UFO craze and the SETI movement.Several 19th century scientists contemplated how we might communicate withpossible Martians and Venusians.
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2009 has been declared the International Year of Astronomy by the UN General Assembly in collaboration with the International Astronomical Union. ESA is participating in the opening ceremony taking place in Paris 15 and 16 January.
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AP – Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., are trying to figure out why the Mars rover Spirit is acting erratically.
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2009 February 3
Lenticular Clouds Above Washington Tim ThompsonAre those UFOs near that mountain? No — they are multilayered lenticularclouds.Moist air forced to flow upwardaround mountain tops can createlenticularclouds.Water droplets condense from moist air cooled below the dew point, and cloudsare opaque groups of water droplets.Waves in the air that would normally be seenhorizontally can then be seen vertically, by the different levels where clouds form. On some days the city of Seattle,Washington,USA, istreated to an usual sky show when lenticular clouds form near Mt. Rainier, a large mountain that looms just under 100 kilometers southeast of thecity.This imageof a spectacular cluster oflenticularclouds was taken last December.pixels in space
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Following on from the successful “Vega maiden flight CubeSat workshop” held at ESA/ESTEC in January 2008, which was the first CubeSat workshop to be held at European-level, the ESA Education Office is pleased to announce the Second European CubeSat workshop one year later as planned.
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ESA PR 03-2009. Today in Brussels, the amendment to the EC-ESA GMES agreement was signed by Mr Jean-Jacques Dordain, the ESA Director General, and Mr Heinz Zourek, Director General of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry.
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Entries are now being welcomed for the 4th Global Trajectory Optimisation Competition. The competition seeks to find the best solution to an interplanetary trajectory problem. It has proved a unique playground for researchers to test new ideas and to compare methods.
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Listening to the early universe just got harder. A team led by Alan Kogut of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., today announced the discovery of cosmic radio noise that booms six times louder than expected. The finding comes from a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE, which stands for the Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission. In July 2006, the instrument launched from NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, and flew to an altitude of 120,000 feet, where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space……..
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Reuters – NASA delayed its first shuttle launch of the year for at least a week to allow time for engineers to review a potential problem with valves that keep the fuel tank pressurized, managers said on Tuesday.
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SPACE.com – Editor’s Note: This article was updated at 2:55 p.m. ET to reflect additional perspective from another astronomer, questioning the claim that this planet is the smallest exoplanet known.
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