New satellite blasts off for space mapping

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched Monday a new breed of satellite called WISE on a mission to orbit Earth and map the skies to find elusive cosmic objects, including potentially dangerous asteroids.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) will use infrared rays to map the locations and sizes of roughly 200,000 asteroids and give scientists a clearer idea of how many space rocks loom and what danger they pose.

“When we find them, we will give the information to policy-makers to decide what to do to try to prevent these near-Earth asteroids colliding with our planet,” NASA public affairs officer J. D. Harrington told AFP.

The launch went ahead flawlessly at 6:09 a.m. (10:09 p.m. in Manila) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. WISE will orbit 500 kilometers above Earth’s surface for 10 months as it hunts for and collects data on dim objects such as dust clouds, brown dwarf stars and asteroids in the dark spaces between planets and stars.

The satellite will map the cosmos in infrared light, covering the whole sky one-and-a-half times – one orbit of Earth will take six months – and snapping pictures of everything.

European space telescope reveals newborn stars

CBC News

The European Space Agency has unveiled images taken by the Herschel space telescope of a stellar nursery that was shrouded in dust until now.

The cloud, located 1,000 light years away in the constellation Aquila, the eagle, contains about 700 clumps of gas and dust in the process of becoming stars.

ESA astronomers say about 100 of these condensations are protostars, stars in the final stages of forming but not yet undergoing nuclear fusion.

The image shows an area of space 65 light years across. No previous infrared space telescope has been able to penetrate the dense clouds of dust that hide the stellar nursery from view.

The Herschel telescope contains more sensitive infrared instruments than any previous telescope, the ESA says.

The image was taken Oct. 24, combining data from two different instruments on Herschel. The two bright spots in the image are caused by newborn stars that make the hydrogen gas around them shine.

The stellar nursery picture is the first one released from the ESA’s Online Showcase of Herschel Images, a library of the telescope’s best images, due to go live Wednesday.

The Herschel Space Observatory was launched May 15 along with the Planck space telescope.

The mirror the Herschel relies on to draw and focus light is the largest ever launched into space, with a diameter of 3.5 metres, almost 1½ times as large as the mirror on the Hubble space telescope.

The James Webb infrared space telescope, a joint project of NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency scheduled to go into space in 2012, will have a 6.5-metre mirror.