Laboratory Equipment

Experiment to Examine the Beginnings of the Universe

When did the first stars and galaxies form in the universe? How brightly did they burn their nuclear fuel? Scientists will seek to gain answers to these questions with the launch of the Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRIment (CIBER) on a Black Brant XII suborbital sounding rocket between 11 and 11:59 p.m. EDT, June 4 from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

/Jamie Bock, CIBER principal investigator from the California Institute of Technology, says, “The first massive stars to form in the universe produced copious ultraviolet light that ionized gas from neutral hydrogen. CIBER observes in the near infrared, as the expansion of the universe stretched the original short ultraviolet wavelengths to long near-infrared wavelengths today. CIBER investigates two telltale signatures of first star formation – the total brightness of the sky after subtracting all foregrounds, and a distinctive pattern of spatial variations.”

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/experiment-examine-beginnings-universe

Asteroid Sample Return Mission Goes into Development

NASA’s first mission to sample an asteroid is moving ahead into development and testing in preparation for its launch in 2016.

The Origins-Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) passed a confirmation review this week called Key Decision Point (KDP)-C. NASA officials reviewed a series of detailed project assessments and authorized the spacecraft’s continuation into the development phase.

Read more: http://www.chromatographytechniques.com/videos/2013/05/asteroid-sample-return-mission-goes-development

Bright Explosion Seen on the Moon

For the past eight years, NASA astronomers have been monitoring the Moon for signs of explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. “Lunar meteor showers” have turned out to be more common than anyone expected, with hundreds of detectable impacts occurring every year.

They’ve just seen the biggest explosion in the history of the program. “On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/videos/2013/05/bright-explosion-seen-moon

Mars Rover Breaks 40-Year-Old Record

While Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt visited Earth’s moon for three days in December 1972, they drove their mission’s Lunar Roving Vehicle 19.3 nautical miles (22.210 statute miles or 35.744 kilometers). That was the farthest total distance for any NASA vehicle driving on a world other than Earth until yesterday.

The team operating NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity received confirmation in a transmission from Mars that the rover drove 263 feet (80 meters) on Thursday, bringing Opportunity’s total odometry since landing on Mars in January 2004 to 22.220 statute miles (35.760 kilometers).

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/mars-rover-breaks-40-year-old-record

First Evidence for Extraterrestrial High-Energy Neutrinos

A massive telescope in the Antarctic ice has reported the detection of 28 extremely high-energy neutrinos that might have their origin in cosmic sources. Two of these reached energies greater than one petaelectronvolt (PeV), an energy level thousands of times higher than the highest energy neutrino yet produced in a manmade accelerator.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, run by an international collaboration and headquartered at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) at the Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison, identified the neutrinos, which were described in a talk at the IceCube Particle Astrophysics Symposium at UW–Madison.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/first-evidence-extraterrestrial-high-energy-neutrinos

China Probes High-Altitude Atmosphere

Chinese scientists have conducted an experiment in the high-altitude atmosphere and near-Earth space with the launch of a sounding rocket.

The National Space Science Center (NSSC) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences says the rocket was launched at 9 p.m. Monday from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/china-probes-high-altitude-atmosphere

Clouds Hide Orion’s Fiery Ribbon

A dramatic new image of cosmic clouds in the constellation of Orion reveals what seems to be a fiery ribbon in the sky. This orange glow represents faint light coming from grains of cold interstellar dust, at wavelengths too long for human eyes to see. It was observed by the European Southern Observatory (ESO)-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) in Chile.

Clouds of gas and interstellar dust are the raw materials from which stars are made. But these tiny dust grains block our view of what lies within and behind the clouds — at least at visible wavelengths — making it difficult to observe the processes of star formation.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/clouds-hide-orions-fiery-ribbon

NASA Says Kepler’s Days are Numbered

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope is broken, potentially jeopardizing the search for other worlds where life could exist outside our solar system.

If engineers can’t find a fix, the failure could mean an end to the $600 million mission’s search, although the space agency wasn’t ready to call it quits. The telescope has discovered scores of planets but only two so far are the best candidates for habitable planets.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/nasa-says-keplers-days-are-numbered

Image of the Week: Astronauts Fix ISS

Expedition 35 Flight Engineers Chris Cassidy (pictured) and Tom Marshburn (out of frame) completed a spacewalk at 2:14 p.m. EDT May 11, 2013 to inspect and replace a pump controller box on the International Space Station’s far port truss (P6) leaking ammonia coolant. The two NASA astronauts began the 5-hour, 30-minute spacewalk at 8:44 a.m.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/image-week-astronauts-fix-iss

Telescopes Help Study Atmospheres of Far-Off Worlds

Gone are the days of being able to count the number of known planets on your fingers. Today, there are more than 800 confirmed exoplanets – planets that orbit stars beyond our sun – and more than 2,700 other candidates. What are these exotic planets made of? Unfortunately, you cannot stack them in a jar like marbles and take a closer look. Instead, researchers are coming up with advanced techniques for probing the planets’ makeup.

One breakthrough to come in recent years is direct imaging of exoplanets. Ground-based telescopes have begun taking infrared pictures of the planets posing near their stars in family portraits. But to astronomers, a picture is worth even more than a thousand words if its light can be broken apart into a rainbow of different wavelengths.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/videos/2013/05/telescopes-help-study-atmospheres-far-worlds

Dead Stars are ‘Polluted’ with Planetary Debris

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them. This discovery suggests that rocky planet assembly is common in clusters, say researchers.

The stars, known as white dwarfs — small, dim remnants of stars once like the Sun — reside 150 light-years away in the Hyades star cluster, in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull). The cluster is relatively young, at only 625 million years old.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/dead-stars-are-polluted-planetary-debris