Cryosat ice mission returns first science

19 December 2010

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco 

The Cryosat-2 spacecraft has produced its first major science result.

Radar data from the European satellite has been used to make a map of ocean circulation across the Arctic basin.

Cryosat's primary mission is to measure sea-ice thickness, which has been in sharp decline in recent decades.

But its ability also to map the shape of the sea surface will tell scientists if Arctic currents are changing as a result of winds being allowed to blow more easily on ice-free waters.

"Nobody really knows how the Arctic is going to behave as the ice retreats, but we do anticipate that significant changes will occur," said Dr Seymour Laxon, a Cryosat science team member from University College London, UK.

"This is just the first data, and it shows we now have the tool to monitor what is happening," he told BBC News.

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Space Pictures This Week: Cosmic Gem, Sun Burp, Vegas

Cosmic Gem

Image courtesy ESA/NASA

Is it a massive opal? A huge holiday ornament? A multicolored stargate? No, it's the leftover cloud of hot gas and dust created by a star that ended its life in a violent explosion.

The new picture of this cosmic bauble, released Tuesday, combines data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Known as SNR 0509-67.5, the supernova remnant sits about 160,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way galaxy. Chandra's x-ray vision shows the soft greens and blues from hot material, while Hubble's visual-light data reveals the visible, glowing pink shell of gas being superheated by an expanding shock wave.

Published December 15, 2010

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NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has reached the outside edge of the solar system.

A NASA space probe dispatched 33 years ago for the first close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn has entered the tail of the solar system, a place where the constant stream of charged particles flowing from the sun ebbs.

This final phase of solar system exploration should last another four years, computer models show, though scientists overseeing the two Voyager spacecraft really don't know what to expect.

Voyager 1 is now about 10.8 billion miles from the sun, traveling in a region of space known as the heliosheath, a turbulent area between the sphere of space influenced by the sun and magnetic forces from interstellar space that lies beyond.

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