News archive

News archive

What is a comet really like? What is its interior like? Could it be a fluffy agglomeration of snow and dirt? Or perhaps it is solid all the way through like an iceberg encrusted with black organic material? Some have even likened it to a chocolate cake with a dark surface overlying a mixture of porous and solid material!
Published: 5 July 2001
There are many kinds of celestial objects in the Universe but we are far from knowing them all. XMM-Newton may have discovered a new one: a very luminous soft X-ray source that is pulsating extremely rapidly in the central region of the Andromeda galaxy. This unusual object could be a new kind of accreting white dwarf.
Published: 4 July 2001
Like many of Copenhagen's inhabitants, Dr Niels Lund cycles to work everyday, a 5 km distance from his home to the Danish Space Research Institute. For the past six years, his thoughts whilst peddling have been set on the successful completion of JEM-X, one of the four science instruments aboard ESA's gamma-ray observatory INTEGRAL.
Published: 3 July 2001
The European Space Agency and NASA have identified a new mission scenario in order to solve the Huygens radio communications problem and fully recover the scientific return from the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its giant moon Titan.
Published: 2 July 2001
In trying to explain the origins of the Universe scientists have taken a step-by-step approach, and ESA's Planck is currently at the top of the staircase. Several experiments, both on Earth and in space, are blazing the trail which will soon be travelled by Planck, on its search for the holy grail of cosmology: the set of 'magic numbers' which define our Universe. Planck, the 'ultimate' tool to find out how everything started, is the first European space mission to study the Big Bang and will be launched in 2007.
Published: 29 June 2001
About 100 European scientists are gathering in ESTEC over the nexttwo days to consider plans for the scientific organisation of Gaia - ESA's ambitious mission to help unravel the origin and evolution of our Galaxy. Experts in general relativity, extra-solar planets, and a whole host of other relevant disciplines are coming together to pool their knowledge about how Gaia can best be organised.
Published: 27 June 2001
Piercing the heart of a globular star cluster with its needle-sharp vision, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered tantalising clues to what could potentially be a strange and unexpected population of wandering, planet-sized objects.
Published: 27 June 2001
The launch date of Solar Orbiter, ESA's next mission to study the Sun, should be no later than 2010. This was one of the key messages to emerge from the first Solar Orbiter workshop which was held in Tenerife last month.
Published: 26 June 2001
An astronaut who exits a spacecraft without a spacesuit will die very quickly because there is no air to breathe. However, although space is often regarded as an airless vacuum, it is by no means empty. Spacecraft such as Cluster are built to detect and study the sparse 'soup' of electrified plasma - mostly electrons and protons - that populates near-Earth space.
Published: 25 June 2001
The European Space Agency solicits the participation of the scientific community in the Mars Express Orbiter and Lander Programme to further increase the scientific return of the selected investigations and of the mission as a whole, through this Announcement of Opportunity (AO).
Published: 23 June 2001
Alcatel Space, prime contractor for ESA's Herschel and Planck space telescopes.The largest contract ever in the history of European space astronomy has been awarded by the European Space Agency, ESA, to an industrial consortium led by Alcatel Space Industries (France), for the manufacture of two ESA astronomy satellites, the Herschel Space Observatory and Planck.
Published: 22 June 2001
The first solar eclipse of the new millennium was enjoyed yesterday by thousands of observers in southern Africa. As tourists and residents enjoyed one of Nature's most impressive sights, it was business as usual for SOHO.
Published: 22 June 2001
An aluminium mockup of ESA's Huygens probe was last week successfully launched by balloon from an Italian Space Agency base in Sicily. The mockup carried onboard a model of the HASI experiment, one of six experiments currently on its way to Titan.
Published: 21 June 2001
The January 2003 launch of ESA's Rosetta comet chaser by an Ariane 5 rocket was confirmed on Tuesday, 19 June, at the Paris Air Show.
Published: 21 June 2001
Members of the Mars Express project and industrial teams travelled to the steppes of Kazakhstan last month to inspect the Baikonur cosmodrome where Mars Express will be launched on board a Soyuz-Fregat rocket in June 2003.
Published: 20 June 2001
The Optical Monitor telescope onboard XMM-Newton has obtained one of the most striking ultraviolet pictures ever taken of the 'LINER' galaxy M81. Strong ultraviolet (UV) emission is a feature of star formation, supernova explosions and the accretion of matter by a supermassive black hole.
Published: 19 June 2001
On 10 May, most of the instruments on board Ulysses recorded their highest readings during the ten and a half years that the spacecraft has been in orbit. The cause was a spectacular coronal mass ejection (CME) which had left the Sun three days previously, heading towards the position in space that Ulysses was occupying at the time.
Published: 19 June 2001
Scientific teams going to Africa for the total solar eclipse, on 21 June, will rely on the ESA-NASA SOHO spacecraft to show them the Sun's weather during the event.
Published: 18 June 2001
The 36th annual "John C. Lindsay Memorial Lecture" was delivered by ESA scientist Michael Perryman at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, USA. The lecture, on the "Three Dimensional Structure of our Galaxy", was based on theresults from ESA's Hipparcos mission.
Published: 18 June 2001
29-Mar-2024 11:40 UT

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