Male Hubble teams getting more telescope time

Researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) which runs the Hubble Space Telescope program, have found that there continues to be a gap between the number of projects given the go-ahead by male principle investigators (PIs) versus those headed by females.

Principle Investigators (PIs) are typically listed as the lead on proposals and when they are male, the researchers report, the chances are greater that their project will be approved.

In their paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv (soon to be published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific) the researchers note that efforts have been made to get rid of gender bias, but there still appears to be room for improvement.

It's not easy getting time on Hubble, researchers must form teams and then come up with something relevant and interesting to study.

After that, they have to write a proposal and submit it to STScI, after review the proposal is accepted or rejected, only a quarter of those submitted wind up getting telescope time.

Unfortunately, it seems that the odds are diminished even further if the PI is female. Not by much, the researchers report, just by four or five projects each proposal cycle, but that's enough to cause concern, especially in light of the fact that program officials have been trying to eliminate such perceived bias.

They've tried giving talks to reviewers, to explain the problem in the hopes it will cause them to be less biased, they've tried moving team members name to the back page, and even using just an initial for the first name of the PI. None of its worked, and the researchers don't know why.

They acknowledge that it's possible that female led proposals are simply not as interesting or as well thought out or written, in some cases, but also point out that very few if any proposals are written by only female teams, they're all filled with both men and women. Gender appears to only play a role for the PI.

The researchers have been studying the problem for two years, and are still mystified by the lack of change, they note that the problem is more pronounced when the PI is more senior, the difference is smaller for recent graduates, suggesting that the problem may solve itself given time.

They also note that Hubble isn't the only program with the problem, some small studies have suggested that female led proposals meet with less success on other observatories as well.

More information: Full paper: arxiv.org/abs/1409.3528

NASA X-Calibur: Black hole seeking telescope carried by giant balloon

High pressure helium is used to inflate the balloon that will carry X-Calibur high into the atmosphere. 

This photo of the balloon was taken during a previous mission in Antarctica. 

Credit: NASA

Scientists from NASA's Scientific Balloon Facility and University of Washington in St. Louis will soon launch a telescope with a giant balloon, planning the launch for sometime later this month.

Reaching heights of around 120,000 feet, the balloon will carry a polarimeter telescope meant to search for black holes.

X-Calibur, a polarimeter telescope measures a powerful kind of X-Ray that is emitted by objects being pulled into a black hole.

Black holes don't even let light escape their incredible gravity, and that's why scientists need a certain kind of telescope that can identify the X-Rays on the fringes of the black hole, which will give them an idea of its size and rotation speed.

Part of the goal of the mission is to test Einstein's theory of general relativity, which set certain parameters for how fast he believed a black hole can spin.

Launch Preparation

Scott Barthelmy, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, described the complicated pre-launch procedure needed to inflate the balloon and prep X-Calibur for flight.

The first step will be to roll out the ultra-thin plastic sheets of the balloon. Hoses will then pump pressurized helium into the balloon, which will expand and cause the balloon to rise in a mushroom-shaped cloud, until the 40-million-cubic foot (1,132,674 cubic meters) interior is full.

The ground weight will then be lifted off the balloon to let it rise. About 900 feet (274 m) of balloon material will be rolled out on the ground, and as the balloon rises it will pick up more and more of this train.

The very end of the balloon will be attached to X-Calibur.

A small crane will cradle X-Calibur about 10 feet (3 m) over the ground.

When the balloon drifts directly over the telescope and begins pulling up, a technician will be standing by to release the telescope from the crane.

If the release comes too early, the telescope could drop to the ground and smash. If it comes too late, the crane release could jam.

NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility website will host a live broadcast of the launch, which the scientists expect will happen around Sept. 14 or 15, if weather conditions allow. After the balloon launches, anyone can track its progress with a live Google map.

The Ice Cube: Searching for Neutrinos at the South Pole - Video

Scientists like Ignacio Taboada, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics, are using a one cubic kilometer block of ice at the South Pole to help unravel one of the great scientific mysteries of our time.

A 250 TeV neutrino interaction in IceCube. 

At the neutrino interaction point (bottom), a large particle shower is visible, with a muon produced in the interaction leaving up and to the left. 

The direction of the muon indicates the direction of the original neutrino.

Image Credit: NSF

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole is a telescope like no other on Earth.

This giant structure buried deep beneath the Antarctic ice has done what no other telescope or space probe could, it has discovered the first neutrinos from outside our solar system.

IceCube’s discovery has created a whole new frontier for astronomers. One where scientists don’t just observe giant objects from distant galaxies, but the tiny particles that form them.

This discovery may help scientists explain supernovae, black holes, pulsars, active galactic nuclei and other extreme extra-galactic phenomena.

The IceCube Observatory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, in Antarctica.

Image Credit: Sven Lidstrom, Intensive research

Neutrinos are tiny, near-massless particles created by “cosmic accelerators”.

These are violent astrophysical sources such as exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars.

Neutrinos aren’t rare: our sun creates 65 billion neutrinos every second for every square centimetre of Earth, but neutrinos from outside the solar system are extremely hard to detect; partly because they are so incredibly small, but also because we are swamped with billions upon billions from inside our own solar system.

The IceCube Observatory has found 28 needles in this metaphorical haystack, 28 neutrinos that scientists are convinced are from outside our solar system.

The hot water drill manages to bore deep holes through the Antarctic ice.

Image Credit: NSF

Currently the IceCube can’t tell us the exact origins of the neutrinos but they have speculated on the direction and general area.

According to Science magazine: “the origin of this flux is unknown, the findings are consistent with expectations for a neutrino population with origins outside the solar system.”

The IceCube Observatory was designed for this very purpose. It is a unique structure consisting of 86 strings drilled deep into the Antarctic ice.

Attached to these strings are 5,160 digital optical modules, which are embedded between 1.4 and 2.4km below the Antarctic ice.

Vladimir Papitashvili

"IceCube is a wonderful and unique astrophysical telescope.” said Vladimir Papitashvili, Antarctic astrophysics and geospace science programme director with the National Science Foundation.

“It is deployed deep in the Antarctic ice, but looks over the entire universe."

The IceCube Observatory consists of 86 arrays dug almost two and a half kilometres into the ice. 

Image credit: Nasa-verve, Wikipedia

How it works
Neutrinos carry information about the workings of the most distant phenomena in the universe.

But it’s hard to capture /measure neutrinos because they are near massless, and carry no electrical charge.

Neutrinos are not affected by electromagnetic forces, and pass straight through matter, including the Earth.

They do, however, causes tiny flashes of blue light, called Cherenkov light, when they interact with the ice. It is these tiny blue flashes deep beneath the South Pole that IceCube has been built to monitor.

A Digital Optical Module (DOM) being attached to the final string just before the detector array was switched online 

Image Credit: Peter Rejcek, NSF

Rather than looking into the sky, the IceCube monitor has over five thousand Digital Optical Modules (DOMs).

Each one has a photomultiplier tube (PMT) and a data acquisition computer. A PMT is a vacuum tube that is extremely sensitive to light in the ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared range.

It can multiply the current produced by such light by as much as 100 million times.

Digital Optical Modules are suspended on strings in holes melted into the ice using a hot water drill, at depths ranging from 1,450 to 2,450 metres 

Image Credit: Amble, Wikipedia

Breaking the ice
These DOMs are attached to 86 different strings that have been buried deep beneath the ice.

Scientists used a hot water drill to bore holes with depths ranging from 1,450 to 2,450 metres and suspended the DOMs on the strings beneath the ice.

The photomultiplier tube inside the DOM scans for the Cherenkov effect, and the on-board computer sends any data back to the surface.

According to the National Science Foundation the observation of 28 very high-energy particle events constitutes the first solid evidence for astrophysical neutrinos from cosmic accelerators.

Francis Halzen

"This is the first indication of high-energy neutrinos coming from outside our solar system," says Francis Halzen, principal investigator of IceCube and the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"It is gratifying to finally see what we have been looking for. This is the dawn of a new age of astronomy."

South Pole telescope detector aids study of the universe

Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) users from Argonne's High Energy Physics and Materials Science divisions helped design and operate part of the South Pole Telescope, a project that aims a large telescope at the night sky to track radiation from the period just after the universe was born. 

Developing and designing the detectors for the camera required expertise from several Argonne facilities and research divisions, including the expertise and capabilities in CNM's Nanofabrication & Devices Group.

In the wake of the Big Bang, all matter was hot, dense particles and light. As the universe aged, it began to spread and cool, and the intense light from that period traveled across space.

The light is still traveling and has a very distinct radiation signature called the cosmic microwave background. 

Mapping the cosmic microwave background can reveal information about dark matter and dark energy, which are thought to make up 95% of the universe.

Dark energy affects the way galaxy clusters form. By comparing the distribution of distant galaxy clusters with the distribution observed nearby, scientists can decode the role dark energy plays in the universe.

The majority of cosmic microwave background radiation has wavelengths of 1-2 mm. These photons are absorbed by water, so a dry, flat and preferably cold space is needed to capture them.

The South Pole is one of only two ideal locations on Earth. The South Pole telescope is more than 30 feet across, and Argonne scientists helped build its camera.

Detectors for the camera were developed and designed with expertise from several Argonne facilities and research divisions.

At the core of the detector technology is a thin—at the nanoscale—superconducting film comprised of Mo/Au bilayer-based heterostructures modified with superconducting (niobium) and normal (gold) metal stripes.

Superconductors can carry an electrical charge perfectly and are highly sensitive to changes in temperature.

When thermal radiation from the cosmic microwave background hits the camera, it heats the material slightly, changing the conductivity of the film.

The energy coming from that particular part of the sky is then recorded.

More information: D. Hanson et al., "Detection of B-Mode Polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background with Data from the South Pole Telescope," Physical Review Letters, 111, 141301 (2013)

NASA Telescope IRIS Snaps 1st Photos of Sun

A still image from the first movie captured by the IRIS solar observatory, 21 hours after mission controllers opened the telescope’s door.

Credit: NASA/IRIS

NASA's newest solar observatory has taken its first photos of the lowest layers of the solar atmosphere, a mysterious and little-understood region of the sun.

The images, taken just 21 hours after mission controllers first opened the telescope’s door, reveal new details of the sun’s lower atmosphere — an area known as the "interface region."

The IRIS spacecraft (short for Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph) captured images of thin magnetic structures and streams of material in the solar atmosphere.

These early observations suggest tremendous amounts of energy flow through the interface region, according to NASA officials.

"With this grand opening of the telescope door and first observations from IRIS, we've opened a new window into the energetics of the sun's atmosphere," John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "We look forward to the new insights IRIS will provide."

ESA Herschel telescope: Fuel Tanks emptied and shut down

ESA's billion-euro Herschel space telescope has been shut down.

Controllers on Monday emptied the satellite's fuel tanks and commanded the observatory to sever all communications.

The "passivated" spacecraft is now in a slow drift around the Sun, about 2.14 million km from Earth.

With its 3.5m mirror and three state-of-the-art instruments, Herschel was the most powerful observatory of its kind ever put in space.

In its four years of operations, it gathered pictures and other data at far-infrared wavelengths that have transformed our understanding of star formation and galaxy evolution.

The final command to turn off the communications transponder was sent from the European Space Operations Centre (Esoc) in Darmstadt, Germany, at 12:25 GMT.

The great distance to Herschel meant it took six seconds for the radio message to reach the observatory and a further six seconds for ground stations on Earth to confirm the loss of signal.

Micha Schmidt

"It really was a beautiful spacecraft," said Micha Schmidt, the European Space Agency's (Esa) Herschel spacecraft operations manager.

"It never gave us too much trouble. And that allowed us to streamline things; to learn a lot about pointing the spacecraft, for example. This meant we could maximise the science," he told reporters.

Empty tanks
Decommissioning became necessary when Herschel used up the last of its superfluid helium coolant.

This had maintained the efficient working of the instruments and their detectors, which needed to be kept just fractions of a degree above absolute zero.

When the helium ran dry, Herschel was effectively blind to the objects it wanted to see on the sky.

End-of-life actions involved moving the satellite from its observation station, a gravitational "sweetspot" about 1.5 million km on the "nightside" of the Earth known as the second Lagrangian point (L2).

This will keep the 7m-long spacecraft well clear of other astronomy missions that want to use L2's very stable temperature and light conditions.

Controllers also emptied Herschel's hydrazine propellant tanks to reduce the risk of future explosion.

This involved commanding the satellite to fire its thrusters to exhaustion.

As Herschel drifts, probably in a slow tumble, it will continue to charge its batteries and provide power to the onboard computer.

"In normal circumstances, there is an automatic recovery function whereby Herschel would try to switch on the transponder, but we have overridden this," said Mr Schmidt.

"It will never contact Earth again. We could re-command it. This mode is hardwired and we can't overcome this. But we have no intention of doing that."

Next up
Although the spacecraft operation phase may be over, the huge amount of data acquired by Herschel means that the science phase is only now getting into its stride.

Astronomers will continue to scrutinise Herschel's pictures and make discoveries long into the future.

Many of its observations will also be followed up by other telescopes that are able to see some of the same wavelengths of lights. Among them is the ESO giant new Alma radio network in Chile.

"Herschel has been so impressive and its scientific discoveries will continue for a decade at least, if not longer. When you have a cryogenic telescope like this, you almost have to rush because you know it will operate only for a finite time - you have to get all your observations done as fast as you can. But then you go through the data and we will be doing that for a very long time to come," said Prof Alvaro Gimenez, Esa's science director.

"Herschel has taught us so much about stars and planets in our own galaxy. It has shown us how many stars form along great filaments [of gas and dust]. That's something we simply didn't know before," he told reporters at the Paris Air Show.

Herschel was launched in 2009 with the Planck Surveyor, which was also stationed at L2.

This telescope, which has been studying the "oldest light" in the Universe, is expected to end its mission around October and will be passivated in the same way as its sibling.

Esa's next mission to the Lagrangian point will be Gaia.

Scheduled to launch in September, this space telescope will make the most precise map yet of the stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.

Colossus: Heat-Seeking, Alien-Hunting Telescope Ready In 5 Years

We might find aliens through the heat their civilizations give off, astronomers say, but it will take a megatelescope to do the job. Such a telescope, in fact, is planned.

The Colossus telescope would be a massive 250-foot (77 meters) telescope, which is more than double the aperture of any telescope yet constructed.

To keep costs down, the proposed $1 billion telescope would use thin mirror technology and few large aperture mirror segments.

The sensitivity of the scope, though, could be enough to spot cities or other signs of aliens for planets as far as 60 to 70 light-years from Earth, its backers said.

Jeff Kuhn

"If we had an investor come and say 'look, here are the resources you need,' we could have the telescope built within five years," said Jeff Kuhn, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, who is on the proposal team.

Building on Dyson spheres
In searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, astronomers generally focus on seeking out beamed signals from other civilizations.

In four decades of searching, nothing definitive has been found.

There were, however, a few interesting moments, such as the so-called "Wow!" signal heard in 1977 that was never repeated.

There are limitations with that method, however. Perhaps the aliens might not send out signals themselves. Perhaps they broadcast in channels we wouldn't think of using.

Moreover, humans should perhaps be cautious about sending out signals and alerting more advanced civilizations to their presence, as Stephen Hawking has said.

This is where Colossus can shine, Kuhn said. The telescope is a passive receiver that allows astronomers to seek out extraterrestrials without alerting them to the search.

Kuhn's team builds on a concept first proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson in the 1960s. Humans can capture only a fraction of the energy sent out by the sun, but a more advanced civilization would want to grab as much as possible.

Dyson suggested an extraterrestrial civilization would surround their star with a structure — now known as a "Dyson sphere" — that would capture the energy needed and then bleed the rest off into space.

From Earth, a star that is faint optically but very strong in the infrared could be an indication of such a sphere, Dyson mused.

Kuhn's team, rather than focusing on stars, is instead looking at the surfaces of alien planets.

"Similarly, an exoplanet that was optically dark, but thermally bright, would be evidence of extraterrestrial civilization," Kuhn said.

ESA ESO APEX Telescope Reveals Spectacular 'Fiery Ribbon' in Orion Nebula

This dramatic new image of cosmic clouds in the constellation of Orion reveals what seems to be a fiery ribbon in the sky. 

The orange glow represents faint light coming from grains of cold interstellar dust, at wavelengths too long for human eyes to see. 

CREDIT: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2

APEX telescope in Chile has captured stunning new photos of a cosmic ribbon shimmering in the Orion nebula more than 1,000 light-years from Earth.

The new images — released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) today (May 15) — show what scientists described as a "fiery ribbon" of red gas and dust shining in the constellation Orion's belt.

The ribbon is a small part of a huge star-forming region of the universe.

ESO scientists used the APEX telescope in Chile to craft a video tour of the clouds of dust that combine to create new stars.

"The large bright cloud in the upper right of the image is the well-known Orion Nebula, also called Messier 42," ESO officials wrote in a news release.

"It is readily visible to the naked eye as the slightly fuzzy middle 'star' in the sword of Orion. The Orion Nebula is the brightest part of a huge stellar nursery where new stars are being born, and is the closest site of massive star formation to Earth."



Although the clouds of dust and gas in the red-tinted image might look as if they're burning hot, they are actually freezing cold.

ESO's APEX telescope in Chile took the photo in wavelengths invisible to the human eye. In this image, the hottest object glow blue while the coolest have an orange tint.

ESA: Yepun, one of the Unit Telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT)

Yepun (UT4), one of the Unit Telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) stands beneath bright star trails appearing to circle the south celestial pole, lying in the southern constellation of Octans (The Octant). 

Many exposures were taken over time and combined to give the final appearance of circular tracks.

Four Unit Telescopes (UTs) make up the VLT at Paranal, Chile.

Each UT possesses a name in the language of the native Mapuche tribe.

The names of the UTs — Antu, Kueyen, Melipal, and Yepun — represent celestial objects: the sun, moon, the Southern Cross constellation and Venus, respectively.

The UT in this photograph is Yepun, also known as UT4. Image released Jan. 7, 2013.One of the Unit Telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) stands beneath bright star trails appearing to circle the south celestial pole, lying in the southern constellation of Octans (The Octant).

Many exposures were taken over time and combined to give the final appearance of circular tracks. Four Unit Telescopes (UTs) make up the VLT at Paranal, Chile. Each UT possesses a name in the language of the native Mapuche tribe.

The names of the UTs — Antu, Kueyen, Melipal, and Yepun — represent celestial objects: the sun, moon, the Southern Cross constellation and Venus, respectively. 

Antartica BLAST sub-millimeter Telescope: Balloon-mounted

NASA's balloon-carried BLAST sub-millimeter telescope is hoisted into launch position on Dec. 25, 2012, at McMurdo Station in Antarctica on a mission to peer into the cosmos.

CREDIT: NASA/Wallops Flight Facility

A giant helium balloon is slowly drifting above Antarctica, about 22 miles (36 kilometers) up.

Launched on Tuesday (Dec. 25) from the National Science Foundation's Long Duration Balloon (LDB) facility on Earth's southernmost continent, it carries a sensitive telescope that measures sub-millimeter light waves from stellar nurseries in our Milky Way.

"Christmas launch!" wrote officials with NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, which oversees the agency's balloon research program, in a Twitter post yesterday. "BLAST launched today from McMurdo Station, Antarctica."

This is the fifth and final mission for BLAST, short for the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope, and mission designers hope it will reveal why so few stars are born in our galaxy.

A time lapse of the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) the largest moving object on Earth - Video

The Giant Endangered Cosmic Ear Inside America's Cell Phone Black Hole - Video

The MAGIC Cherenkov Telescope Array

The MAGIC Collaboration has built in 2001–2003 a first large atmospheric imaging Cherenkov telescope, MAGIC-I, with a mirror surface of 236 sq.m. and equipped with photo-multiplier tubes of optimal efficiency.

In 2009, a second telescope of essentially the same characteristics was added; MAGIC-II was installed at a distance of 85m from MAGIC-I.

With the accent of these instruments on large mirror surface and best light collection, cosmic gamma-rays at an energy threshold lower than any existing or planned terrestrial gamma-ray telescope have become accessible. So far achieved has been a threshold of 25 GeV.

Incredibly Old Spiral Galaxy Found

Astronomers have found a spiral galaxy that formed much earlier than astronomers thought possible, a find that could lead to insights into how galaxies like our Milky Way evolved from more chaotic and disc-like structures into grand spirals.

In the journal Nature, a team led by University of Toronto researcher David Law described Wednesday how they examined this galaxy, dubbed BX442, from an observatory on top of Hawaii's dormant Mauna Kea volcano.

The astronomers' observations are a snapshot of the galaxy's distant past, since the light has been traveling to Earth for nearly 11 billion years.

What they saw was a galaxy much larger than most others that existed at that time in the universe (about 3 billion years after the Big Bang). BX442's spiral shape also made it stand out from the rest.

"As you go back in time to the early universe, galaxies look really strange, clumpy and irregular, not symmetric," co-author and UCLA professor Alice Shapley said in a statement Wednesday.

"The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks. Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?"

The authors think that BX442 may have been twisted into a spiral thanks to gravitational interactions with a nearby dwarf galaxy.

New Views From Telescope Orbiting Mars

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

At the centre of this view of an area of mid-latitude northern Mars, a fresh crater about 6 meters (20 feet) in diameter holds an exposure of bright material, blue in this false-color image.

The latest set of new images from the telescopic High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment Camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter offers detailed views of diverse Martian landscapes.

Features as small as desks are revealed in the 314 observations made between June 6 and July 7, 2010, now available on the camera team's site and NASA's Planetary Data System.

The camera is one of six instruments on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which reached Mars in 2006.

NASA and Microsoft Present: The World Wide MARS telescope Experience

Image credit: Microsoft/NASA. A wide-angle image of Mars from NASA's Viking orbiters and the Mars Orbiter Camera provide a fascinating view of Valles Marineris, commonly known as the Grand Canyon of Mars. To experience Mars up close, Microsoft and NASA encourage viewers to download the new WWT|Mars experience

Ultra-Precise Mirrors and Optical Systems For Space

Ultra-Precise Mirrors and Optical Systems For Space

Metal mirrors made with extremely high precision and exactly positioned are the key elements of modern telescopes.

A new production technique enables complex optical surfaces to be manufactured with excellent trueness of shape and hitherto unattained positional accuracy.

The mirrors have been built for an infrared sounder telescope.

For space research as well as climate observation and weather forecasting satellites need increasingly powerful optical measurement and recording devices.

They often consist of several aspherically shaped mirror elements which through their precise interplay provide the desired reflection of the incident light.

"All the mirrors must be produced and characterised with extreme precision, that is to an accuracy of less than one micrometer. They also have to be exactly positioned in relation to each other," explains Sebastian Scheiding from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF in Jena. Up to now this positioning has been very time consuming as it takes place step by step.

First the individual mirrors are fitted in the telescope one after the other, then the imaging quality is measured.

If inaccuracies or errors are found, they are corrected by positional adjustments to the mirrors. Then further measurements and adjustments are made until all components are optimally arranged.

"We wanted to simplify this complicated and time-consuming adjustment process," says Scheiding. In the research project initiated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) the scientist has therefore developed an innovative production technique which takes into account the later alignment of the components right from the outset.

For this purpose, the individual mirror surfaces are positioned in relation to each other as precisely during processing as they will be later in the telescope. This reduces to a minimum the errors and corrections made when the mirrors are being fitted. The assembly process is simple and reproducible.

"The trick is that we mount all the mirrors for a module in the same machine at the same time and assign them to a common system of coordinates.

To this end, each mirror blank is provided with defined, ultra-precise measurement marks and reference surfaces," explains Scheiding. These fixed marks embody the system of coordinates for diamond turning of the mirror shapes. At the same time, however, they fix the position of each mirror in relation to the adjacent mirrors. Finally they also serve as reference points for subsequent measurement processes to check the quality of the optical system.

Saturn's Auroras Filmed by Hubble

SPACE.com -- Saturn's Auroras Filmed by Hubble

A new Hubble movie shows a rare view of Saturn with its many rings sitting edge-on, providing a dazzling glimpse of the planet's poles and the auroras that dance above them.

It takes Saturn almost thirty years to orbit the sun, with the opportunity to image both of its poles occurring only twice in that period, when the planet reaches its equinox (the point in a planet's orbit when the sun's rays fall perpendicular to the planet's equator).

Saturn hit this position last year, providing Hubble with the unique chance to keep a sustained view of the planet with both its poles in view. The movie they created from the data, collected over several days during January and March 2009, has aided astronomers studying both Saturn's northern and southern auroras.

Given the rarity of such an event, this new footage will likely be the last and best equinox movie that Hubble captures of our planetary neighbor.

As Saturn was approaching its equinox, both poles were equally illuminated by the sun's rays.

Scottish scientists who reach for stars ‘are leading the world’

An image of the Flame Nebula that has given astronomers their most vivid picture of the star formation was offered up by the Scottish government yesterday as proof of the world-leading role maintained by the country’s scientists and researchers.

The photograph was taken by the Vista telescope at the European Southern Observatory, using technology designed and built at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh. That contribution was symbolic of the global importance of the country’s research base, said Anne Glover, the Scottish government’s chief scientific adviser.

“In every area of science Scotland outperforms the world average; our performance is truly stunning for a nation of only five million people,” Professor Glover said. “This is a country full of potential for those in science, engineering and technology.”

Professor Glover was speaking at the presentation of a report that purports to demonstrate the continuing success of home-grown scientists and engineers by comparing rates of publication of academic studies, and by collating the numbers of citations achieved by Scottish researchers in articles published by their peers from other countries.

The 120-page document showed that in sciences as diverse as medicine, agriculture and biology, Scotland has achieved 1.8 per cent of the world’s academic citations, from a population share of less than 0.1 per cent. Scotland even led the field in space sciences, Professor Glover said, though more dogs than Scots have experienced space travel so far.

To read the full article, click here .....

NASA: WISE Telescope Detecting Near Earth Asteroids

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has spotted its first never-before-seen near-Earth asteroid, the first of hundreds it is expected to find during its mission to map the whole sky in infrared light.

The near-Earth object, designated 2010 AB78, was discovered by WISE Jan. 12. After the mission's sophisticated software picked out the moving object against a background of stationary stars, researchers followed up and confirmed the discovery with the University of Hawaii's 2.2-meter (88-inch) visible-light telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea.

The asteroid is currently about 158 million kilometers (98 million miles) from Earth. It is estimated to be roughly 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter and circles the sun in an elliptical orbit tilted to the plane of our solar system. The object comes as close to the sun as Earth, but because of its tilted orbit, it is not thought to pass near our planet. This asteroid does not pose any foreseeable impact threat to Earth, but scientists will continue to monitor it.

WISE, which began its all-sky survey on Jan. 14, is expected to find about 100-thousand previously undiscovered asteroids in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter, and hundreds of new near-Earth asteroids. It will also spot millions of new stars and galaxies.