Space
<p>The Milky Way, the brilliant river of stars that has dominated the night sky and human imaginations since time immemorial, is but a faded memory to one third of humanity and 80 percent of Americans, according to a new global atlas of light pollution produced by Italian and American scientists.</p>
<p>Galaxies “waste” large amounts of heavy elements generated by star formation by ejecting them up to a million light years away into their surrounding halos and deep space, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.</p>
<p>For some comets, breaking up is not that hard to do. A new study led by Purdue University and -Boulder indicates the bodies of some periodic comets – objects that orbit the sun in less than 200 years – may regularly split in two, then reunite down the road.</p>
The bread loaf-sized Miniature X-Ray Solar Spectrometer, or MinXSS, CubeSat will be deployed from an airlock on the International Space Station (ISS) at 4 a.m. MDT on Monday, May 16, beginning its journey into space where it will study emissions from the sun that can affect ground-based communications systems.
A 3-D animation created by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio using data from the MAVEN mission to Mars is the corporate winner of the inaugural Data Stories video contest sponsored by Science magazine for videos that tell stories about data. The video explains how the solar wind is driving particles from the upper atmosphere of Mars into space, which may have caused the planet to dry out and cool over the eons.
First observed in 2005 by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn, a plume shooting into space from cracks on the icy surface of Enceladus is coming from a subterranean, salty ocean beneath the moon’s surface. The latest observations by a team including -Boulder Professor Larry Esposito indicate at least some of the narrow jets blast with increased fury when the moon is farther from Saturn.
Six grants totaling $250,000 have been awarded to projects supporting -Boulder’s Grand Challenge "Our Space. Our Future." which features two major initiatives – Earth Lab and Integrated Remote and In Situ Sensing Initiative (IRISS) – plus more than a dozen related projects.
A new study led by the European Space Agency and NASA involving the University of Colorado Boulder indicates NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected the faint but distinct signature of dust coming from beyond our solar system.
High-tech hardware designed and built at the University of Colorado Boulder will be launched to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard the commercial SpaceX Dragon capsule on Friday, April 8.
Comets and asteroids as large as West Virginia smacking into Mars some 4 billion years ago could have created a haven for life there not so long after the birth of the solar system.