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Screen Saver AnBSoft Deep Space Above and Beyond Download

Sun, 17 Nov 2008 02:19:00 GMT

posted by mangjaya
AnBSoft Deep Space Above and Beyond 1.071 - 10 MB

Peer into the farthest reaches of deep space with Deep Space: Above and Beyond! Featuring breathtaking images from the Hubble Space Telescope and a beatiful, inspiring original score! Everything in this screensaver is real. There are no artists's impressions or computer-generated scenes. These are real images taken of the real cosmos by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Displays breathtaking images from the Hubble Space Telescope, featuring original music
Deep Space: Peer into the farthest reaches of space with Deep Space:Above and Beyond. Featuring breathtaking images from the Hubble Space Telescope and a beatiful, inspiring original score composed exclusively for this screensaver.

Microsoft vs.Google: The New Space Race?

Mon, 21 Oct 2008 07:24:00 GMT

posted by CaseyKazan

Are Microsoft and Google in a space race? We think they are. Their rivalry is also, we believe, a precursor to the next great post-Internet technology boom: space exploration and development.

Microsoft released its new Worldwide Telescope this spring, which will access images from NASA's great fleet of space-born telescopes and earth-bound observatories such as the future Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, partially funded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, which is projected for ???first light??? in 2014 in Chile's Atacama Desert -the world's Southern Hemisphere space-observatory mecca. The 8.4-meter telescope will be able to survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its 3-billion pixel digital camera. The telescope will probe the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, and it will open a movie-like window on objects that change or move rapidly: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids and distant Kuiper Belt objects.

LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it. The 8.4-metre LSST telescope and the 3-gigapixel camera are thus a shared resource for all humanity ??? the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the universe.

Not to be outdone, Google early this spring joined MIT scientists who are designing a satellite-based observatory -the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)- that they say could for the first time provide a sensitive survey of the entire sky to search for earth-like planets outside the solar system that appear to cross in front of bright stars. Google will fund development of the wide-field digital cameras needed for the satellite.

"When starships transporting colonists first depart the solar system, they may well be headed toward a TESS-discovered planet as their new home," says George R. Ricker, senior research scientist at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT.

Microsoft's new free software application called WorldWide Telescope allows everyone from space novices to astronomy professionals to easily explore galaxies, star systems and distant planets.

The WorldWide Telescope links together 12 terabytes -- the data equivalent of 2.6 billion pages of text -- of pictures from sources including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

The experience is similar to playing a video game, allowing users to zoom in and out of galaxies that are thousands of light years away. It allows seamless viewing of far-away star systems and rarely-seen space dust in breathtaking clarity.

Microsoft said it will release the WorldWide Telescope free of charge as a tribute to Jim Gray, a Microsoft researcher who went missing off the coast of California while sailing last year. Gray worked on projects with astronomers to organize the vast amounts of data and images being pulled from satellites.

Google has a similar offering called Google Sky, a companion to its Google Earth program.

Features of WorldWide Telescope include virtual tours of different parts of space, led by expert educators and astronomers. People will be able to use the Microsoft program to create their own space tours, to share with their friends. The program is also notable for its high level of detail, its large volume of data and the ability to fine-tune the views, said Curtis Wong, principal researcher in Microsoft's Next Media Research Group.

"I expect that there are going to be a lot of people learning so much more about the sky, because we've taken away the limitations of light pollution and smog and bad weather," Wong said. "Those of us in Seattle, it's our chance to finally see the sky."

The program runs on the PC desktop but pulls data and images from the Internet. Google Sky can run in a standard Web browser or in the downloadable Google Earth program. But the system requirements for Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope program come with a catch: It works only in Windows XP or Windows Vista.

A test version of the software is available for download at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Hubble Healed

Wed, 30 Oct 2008 21:02:44 GMT

posted by birdwatch

After a month of problems, NASA has successfully resurrected the Hubble Space Telescope. The orbital observatory sent down a test image, taken by its Wide Field Planetary Camera, showing a pair of interacting galaxies. The galaxy on the left, which appears nearly edge on to Hubble's line of sight, is relatively undisturbed. The galaxy on the right shows a clumpy hot patch of blue, indicating new star formation, where it has been gravitationally tugged by its neighbor.

NASA says the blue ring probably formed after the galaxy on the left passed through the galaxy on the right.
The dusty reddish knot at the lower left of the blue ring probably marks the location of the original nucleus of the galaxy that was hit.

The pair, photographed on Tuesday and Wednesday, is known as Arp 147. They are located in the constellation Cetus, more than 400 million light-years away.

NASA had planned for a final shuttle mission in February to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope, but replacement equipment won't be ready in time. A new launch date has not yet been set.

Hubble Directly Observes a Planet Orbiting Another Star

Wed, 13 Nov 2008 20:23:58 GMT

posted by argh2xxx

Posted by god 18 minutes ago (http://www.nasa.gov)
Category: Science

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star.

NASA approves Hubble revival plan

Tue, 15 Oct 2008 20:49:00 GMT

posted by gblass
Circuit switchover could get data flowing again by Friday, managers say

Slide show

The Hubble Story
What’s it like to hang in space and fix the Hubble Space Telescope? Click to see images of Story Musgrave and other astronauts at work, and hear him describe the experience, from scary liftoffs to figuring out which way is up.

By Alan BoyleScience editor

NASA is going ahead with a plan to restart the flow of science data from the Hubble Space Telescope by routing around circuitry that failed a little more than two weeks ago, officials said Tuesday.

The unprecedented switchover is due to begin early Wednesday, and if all goes well, the telescope should be beaming imagery back down to Earth by Friday, said Art Whipple, manager of the Hubble Space Telescope Systems Management Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Last month's glitch forced the postponement of the shuttle Atlantis' servicing mission to the world's best-known space observatory. That mission had been due for launch on Tuesday, but it's now been put off until next February at the earliest. Whipple said the plan for that orbital service call was "still being hashed out."

The operation planned for this week will be done entirely by remote control, from Hubble's operations center on the Goddard campus in Maryland. Controllers will switch Hubble's command and data handling system from the channel it was using, known as Side A, to a backup channel called Side B.

Whipple said NASA's experts were confident that Side A was the source of the glitch that cut off the flow of science data. "As far as we can tell, nothing else was affected," he told journalists during a teleconference Tuesday.

Over the past couple of weeks, teams at Goddard have been testing a spare data-handling unit and checking diagnostics from the telescope to make sure the plan for the switchover was solid. The electronic components on Side B have never been used before during Hubble's 18 years of operation, and it's not certain that they will work this time.

"It is a complicated procedure, and it's one that we have not done end to end before," Whipple said. But he said experts determined that even under the worst-case scenario — for example, if there were a hidden flaw in the Side B electronics — the telescope would not be left in worse shape than it is now.

In order to do the switchover, controllers at Goddard will have to put the telescope into safe mode, issue commands to reroute circuitry through Side B rather than Side A, then return the telescope to its operating condition.

"This is something that is a little out of the norm of what you would do around the house, but it's probably not unlike what an IT professional might do with an office network," Whipple said.

"The difference is, on the ground, you tend to power things on and off and reconfigure by pushing buttons and swapping cables," he said. "Since we can't do that, of course, with something in space, there are ... switches that do the functional equivalent of swapping cables, and remotely commanded relays that allow us to send a command and power something on or off."

In all, 40 to 50 people will be involved in the operation. "People will be working 24/7 for the total time here," said Jon Morse, director of the Astrophysics Division in NASA Headquarters' Science Mission Directorate.

The most critical time in the switchover will last from about 8:30 to 11 a.m. ET Wednesday, Whipple said. If the recovery is successful, the first data should be received from one science instrument late Thursday, with full operation restored on Friday, he said.

The very first image is due to show an internal lamp that is part of the apparatus for Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, which is currently inoperative due to an earlier glitch.

"Nothing could be aesthetically less pleasing," Whipple said, "but it will be a great relief to everyone when we see that flat field illuminated by that internal lamp."

Hubble's managers expect that the first science instrument to be revived would be the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, which has produced some of the telescope's most famous images in the visible-light spectrum. Another imaging device, the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, could come back into service later.

The big upgrade for the telescope, involving the installation of two new instruments and the hoped-for repair of two others, will have to wait until Atlantis gets off the ground. NASA would also send up the spare command and data-handling unit for installation as a replacement part, assuming that the unit passes its ground testing. The telescope would continue to use Side B on the replacement unit, Whipple said.

He said experts may not know exactly why Side A on the current unit suddenly went bad until the apparatus is brought back down to Earth for analysis. But he wouldn't rule out a diagnosis that the normal wear and tear experienced during 18 years of use led to the breakdown.

"Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever," he said.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27181992/