Download 2011 International Space Station Calendar in PDF-format
Source: NASA
Saturday, 1 January 2011
Asteroid Itokawa Sample Return
Source: Nasa Science News
Asteroid Itokawa Sample Return
Dec. 29, 2010: The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa spacecraft has brought home to Earth tiny pieces of an alien world–asteroid Itokawa."It's an incredible feeling to have another world right in the palm of your hand," says Mike Zolensky, Associate Curator for Interplanetary Dust at the Johnson Space Center, and one of the three non-Japanese members of the science team. "We're seeing for the first time, up close, what an asteroid is actually made of!"
He has good reason to be excited. Asteroids formed at the dawn of our solar system, so studying these samples can teach us how it formed and evolved.
Hayabusa launched in 2003 and set out on a billion kilometer voyage to Itokawa, arriving a little over two years later. In 2005, the spacecraft performed a spectacular feat -- landed on the asteroid's surface(1). The hope was to capture samples from the alien world.
But there was a problem. The projectiles set to blast up dust from the surface failed to fire, leaving only the particles kicked up from landing for collection. Did any asteroid dust made it into the collection chamber?
More ...
Venus is closest to the Earth today
If you're feeling romantic tonight, it might be because Venus is closest to the Earth today for 2011. Just 92,750,680km away.
- Auke Slotegraaf on Twitter
Space Photos This Week
As the Stars Turn
Photograph by Kwon O Chul, TWAN
Star trails create arches over the horizon in a long-exposure picture of the night sky taken from Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
The shot, captured in July and released this week, shows the apparent motion of the stars around Polaris, the star that's almost exactly aligned with Earth's north celestial pole. Also called the North Star, Polaris is the brightest dot in the constellation Ursa Minor.
Equatorial regions, such as Kilimanjaro, are the only places on Earth where the celestial poles sit right at the horizon.
Published December 30, 2010
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