Stargazer Captures Striking Nebula View

Bill Snyder captured Sh2-112 Sharpless on July 29, 2012 from his home observatory in Connellsville, Pa.

He used a TMB130mm telescope equipped with an Apogee U8300 camera, as well as an Atlas EQG mount and several filters to view SH2-112.

The total exposure time to capture this image was more than 18 hours.

CREDIT: Bill Snyder, Astrophotography

NASA MAVEN: Instrument delivered to study Martian atmosphere

NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission has reached its next stage, with the delivery of a remote sensor instrument to the company assembling the spacecraft, Lockheed Martin.

The Remote Sensing package will help scientists find clues as to how Mars lost its atmosphere.

The instrument, which was designed and is being built by the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (CU/LASP) under a NASA contract, will now be integrated into the spacecraft.

"Three of the big milestones in an instrument builder's life are the day you get selected to fly on a mission, the day you deliver the instrument to the spacecraft to get ready for launch, and the day that it gets where it's going and data starts flowing back from space," said Mark Lankton, Remote Sensing package program manager from CU/LASP.

The delivery is important because it means the team are shifting from assembling the basic spacecraft to focusing on getting the science instruments installed.

Bruce Jakosky, professor of geological sciences and associate director of science at CU’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator from CU/LASP adds "This is a major step toward getting us to launch and then getting the science return from the mission."

NASA Messenger: Mercury's tectonic plates and pie crust surfaces

NASA MESSENGER has discovered assemblages of tectonic landforms unlike any previously found on Mercury or elsewhere in the Solar System.

The findings are reported in a paper led by Smithsonian scientist Thomas Watters, "Extension and contraction within volcanically buried impact craters and basins on Mercury," published in the December issue of the journal Geology.

The surface of Mercury is covered with deformational landforms that formed by faulting in response to horizontal contraction or shortening as the planet's interior cooled and surface area shrank, causing blocks of crustal material to be pushed together.

Contraction from cooling of Mercury's interior has been so dominant that extensional landforms caused by fault formation in response to horizontal stretching and pulling apart of crustal material had not been previously documented outside of the interiors of a few large impact basins.

ESA GOCE: Gravity mapper surfs Earth's upper atmosphere

Europe's ultra-low-flying gravity-mapping satellite, Goce, is being manoeuvred even closer to the planet.

The arrow-shaped spacecraft has spent most of its mission at an altitude of 255km - that's about 500km below most other Earth-observing missions.

Engineers are now bringing it down by 20km to improve its data resolution.

But it will be a tricky operation. Goce will have to fight atmospheric drag to stay aloft and maintain the stability needed to measure Earth's gravity.

"The science benefit that you get from decreasing the altitude and thereby increasing the spatial resolution of the data, and also the precision of what you can measure, is quite spectacular," explained mission manager Dr Rune Floberghagen. (Interviewed here)

"We will get about a 35% increase in the quality of the data," he reported.

GOCE: The Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer was launched in 2009.

It is part of a series of innovative research satellites developed by the European Space Agency (Esa).

It carries super-sensitive instrumentation to detect the tiny variations in the pull of gravity across the surface of the planet.

The maps it produces can have very broad applications. The data is a key reference in civil engineering for relating heights measured at widely separated locations, and for the computer models that need to understand how the oceans move to forecast future changes in climate.

Recent successes include producing the first global high-resolution map of the boundary between the rocks of the Earth's crust and its mantle - the famous Mohorovicic (or "Moho") discontinuity, which lies tens of kilometres below the planet's surface.

Astronauts Malenchenko, Williams and Hoshide, touched down in Kazakhstan

Russian space agency helicopters and vehicles stand near the Soyuz capsule after the spacecraft 's landing near the town of Arkalyk in northern Kazakhstan.

Russian cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko and two astronauts, Sunita Williams of the US and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan, touched down on the steppes of Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz capsule after spending over four months aboard the International Space Station.

Picture: MAXIM SHIPENKOV/AFP/Getty Images

Water Spout - Image

A waterspout appears close to the shoreline near Batemans Bay, about 225 km (140 miles) south of Sydney

Picture: REUTERS/NSWRFS/Phil Caminiti

Alaska's Redoubt Volcano Blows Off Steam

Redoubt is a 10,196-foot-high (3,108 meters) glacier-covered stratovolcano, about 105 miles (170 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, in Lake Clark National Park.

The volcano formed beginning about 890,000 years ago and a collapse of its summit some 10,500-13,000 years ago produced a major debris avalanche that spread across the region, according to the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program.

An eruption in 1989 hurt the region's economy and halted air travel across the globe.

The volcano's last known eruption was in 2009, and a series of small earthquakes rumbled for a few days in April 2010.