http://www.spacedaily.com/index.html Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST en-us Are we alone in the universe? It's probably the greatest question posed by space exploration. It fascinates scientists and the general public. It's important and deeply compelling. We want to know, and we have ways of finding out. It doesn't cost much to operate a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. Some space missions cost billions of dollars. Most cost hundreds of millions]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST Launch date is looming for three Chinese taikonauts, including the country's first woman in space, who will attempt to manually dock their Shenzhou 9 spacecraft at the orbiting Tiangong 1 space module. The docking will represent an important milestone, and the accomplishment of a key capability, on the Chinese roadmap towards establishing Space Station towards the end of the decade. But question]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST The science instruments aboard NASA's New Horizons spacecraft were running at full tilt, with cameras snapping images, sensors scanning the space environment and the communications system trading radio signals with ground stations on Earth. No matter that the target of this activity - the Pluto system - was still about three years and 850 million miles away. On May 29-30, New Horizons "thought" ]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST Far from Earth, on the opposite side of the sun, deep in the asteroid belt, Dawn is gradually spiraling around the giant protoplanet Vesta. Under the gentle pressure of its uniquely efficient ion propulsion system, the explorer is scaling the gravitational mountain from its low-altitude mapping orbit (LAMO) to its second high-altitude mapping orbit (HAMO2). Dawn spent nearly five months in]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST More atomic hydrogen gas - the ultimate fuel for stars - is lurking in today's Universe than we thought, CSIRO astronomer Dr Robert Braun has found. This is the first accurate measurement of this gas in galaxies close to our own. Just after the Big Bang the Universe's matter was almost entirely hydrogen atoms. Over time this gas of atoms came together and generated galaxies, stars and plan]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST On May 17, 2012 an M-class flare exploded from the sun. The eruption also shot out a burst of solar particles traveling at nearly the speed of light that reached Earth about 20 minutes after the light from the flare. An M-class flare is considered a "moderate" flare, at least ten times less powerful than the largest X-class flares, but the particles sent out on May 17 were so fast and ener]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST On June 5th, 2012, Venus will pass across the face of the sun, producing a silhouette that no one alive today will likely see again. Transits of Venus are very rare, coming in pairs separated by more than a hundred years. This June's transit, the bookend of a 2004-2012 pair, won't be repeated until the year 2117. Fortunately, the event is widely visible. Observers on seven continents, even a sli]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST NASA's next flagship mission - the James Webb Space Telescope - will carry the largest primary mirror ever deployed. This segmented behemoth will unfold to 21.3 feet in diameter once the observatory reaches its orbit in 2018. A team of scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., now is developing an instrument that would image and characterize planets beyond the sol]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST A Venus transit across the face of the sun is a relatively rare event - occurring in pairs with more than a century separating each pair. There have been all of 53 transits of Venus across the sun between 2000 B.C. and the last one in 2004. On Wednesday, June 6 (Tuesday, June 5 from the Western Hemisphere), Earth gets another shot at it - and the last for a good long while. But beyond this uniqu]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST Intelsat has reported a delay in deploying one of the two solar arrays on the Intelsat 19 satellite, which was launched by Sea Launch last week. Intelsat and Space Systems/Loral, the manufacturer of the satellite, are investigating the cause and are pursuing corrective actions. The spacecraft is secure at this time in geostationary transfer orbit. Intelsat 19 is the planned rep]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST Sea Launch AG launched Thursday the Intelsat 19 satellite from the Equator on the ocean-based Launch PlatformOdyssey, completing its eleventh mission for Intelsat S.A. and marking Sea Launch's first of three planned missions in 2012. The Zenit-3SL rocket carrying the spacecraft lifted off at 22:23 Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) on Thursday, May 31st (05:23 UTC/GMT, Friday, June 1) from the la]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST The U.S. Air Force has awarded Lockheed Martin a $68 million contract to provide mission readiness, launch, early orbit checkout and on-orbit operations engineering support for the first two GPS III space vehicles. The first and second GPS III satellites are on schedule for launch availability in 2014 and 2015, respectively. The GPS III program will affordably replace aging GPS satellites ]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST One idea for fighting global warming is to increase the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere, scattering incoming solar energy away from the Earth's surface. But scientists theorize that this solar geoengineering could have a side effect of whitening the sky during the day. New research indicates that blocking 2 percent of the sun's light would make the sky three-to-five times brighter, as well ]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST Every ~120 years a dark spot glides across the Sun. Small, inky-black, almost perfectly circular, it's no ordinary sunspot. Not everyone can see it, but some who do get the strangest feeling, of standing, toes curled in the damp sand, on the beach of a South Pacific isle.... City odors drifted in from Plymouth, across the ship, shoving aside the salt air. Sea gulls fluttered upward, screec]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST In the late eighth century, Earth was hit by a mystery blast of cosmic rays, according to a Japanese study that found a relic of the powerful event in cedar trees. Analysis of two ancient trees found a surge in carbon-14 - a carbon isotope that derives from cosmic radiation - which occurred just in AD 774 and AD 775, the team report in the journal Nature on Sunday. Earth is battered by]]> Mon, 04 JUN 2012 19:37:26 AEST