Artist concept of GRAIL mission. Grail will fly twin spacecraft in tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure its gravity field in unprecedented detail. © NASA/JPL

BEIJING, Sept. 6 — NASA will launch on Thursday twin lunar orbiters built to map the gravity of Earth’s moon in unprecedented detail, media reported Tuesday.

The twin lunar probes, Graili-A and Graili-B, will blast off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 8:37 a.m. EDT and at 9:16 a.m. EDT respectively Thursday, according to NASA.

The Grail twins will travel three to four months to get to the moon under a slower but more economical plan.

The two spacecrafts will reach the moon around New Year’s Day when they will begin to probe the moon’s composition from the crust to the core, according to NASA.

The data collected by the probes will be used to better understand the moon’s evolution and formation, NASA scientists said.

Researchers will also use the twin probes to pinpoint the best landing sites for future explorations.

The mission, from start to finish, costs 496 million U.S. dollars. The two Grail probes will crash into the moon after its mission. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2011-09/06/c_131103031.htm

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory observed a potent blast from the Sun had unleashed a firestorm of radiation on a level not witnessed since 2006. The flare is moving away from the Sun at 1,400 km per second.

The firestorm would deliver a “glancing blow to the Earth’s magnetic field” during the late hours of June 8th or on June 9th, according to the observatory.

The U.S. National Weather Service’s Space Weather Prediction Center said the event is “expected to cause G1 (minor) to G2 (moderate) levels of geomagnetic storm activity tomorrow, June 8, beginning around 1800 GMT.”

“Generally it is not going to cause any big problems, it will just have to be managed,” Bill Murtagh, program coordinator at the NWS’s Space Weather Prediction Center, was quoted by AFP as saying.

But he added that the solar storm could disrupt power grids, satellites, and may cause the rerouting of some flights away from the Polar Regions.

The geomagnetic storm activity will likely be over within 12-24 hours.

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2011-06/08/c_13917369.htm

The researchers said Wednesday it is the most ancient and distant galaxy ever seen — a small proto galaxy some 13.2 billion light-years away.

The dim object, found in images taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, was formed when the universe was just 480 million years old, the researchers said in the journal Nature.

“We’ve gone back through 96 percent of the life of the universe, to when the universe was only 4 percent of its current age, through 500 million years after the Big Bang,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, one of the researchers working on the study.

“The team searched through these wonderful data looking for galaxies at these extremely early times,” he added, “we’re peering into an era where big changes are afoot.”

Light travels at a speed of 300,000 kilometers a second in vacuum, or about 10 trillion kilometers a year. Astronomers use light-year to measure the distances of celestial bodies, and seeing light emitted from objects far away also indicates they were ancient.

The newly discovered galaxy, 13.2 billion light-year away, means the galaxy’s light started to travel 13.2 billion years ago.

Hubble, which was launched in 1990 and orbits outside the Earth’s atmosphere, has played a key role in the research in capturing faint light from the early ages of the universe. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2011-01/27/c_13709523.htm

The Hubble space telescope has observed a planet in the Milky Way galaxy being devoured by its parent star, media reports said Tuesday. ©CRI

BEIJING, May 25 — The Hubble space telescope has observed a planet in the Milky Way galaxy being devoured by its parent star, media reports said Tuesday.

The doomed planet, dubbed WASP-12b, is to be found about 600 light-years away in the winter constellation Auriga, and is the hottest known planet in the galaxy with a surface temperature at around 1,500 degrees Celsius, researchers said.

The planet is so close to its parent star that it can make the orbit around the star in slightly more than 24 hours, and is being stretched into the shape of an elipse by enormous tidal forces.

Previously, scientists had concluded in theory that planets can get absorbed by stars when they get too near to each other. However, it is the first time the phenomenon has been observed so clearly.

Researchers made the observation by using a new instrument called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph that was installed on Hubble last year. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2010-05/25/c_13315261.htm

The Russian Soyuz TMA-15 capsule landed as planned at 10:17 a.m. Moscow time (07:17 GMT) about 85 km north of the town of Arkalyk in Kazakhstan.

The capsule carrying Canadian astronaut Bob Thirsk, Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, and European Space Agency’s astronaut Frank De Winne of Belgium, touched down without a hitch, said Russian Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin.

“The landing was very soft; we were lucky not to have any wind,” Romanenko said in televised remarks after leaving the capsule. “Everything went quite nicely; there were no problems whatsoever.”

The crew will fly back to Russia’s space training center in Star City, outside Moscow, on Tuesday for a reunion with their families and for training on how to deal with gravity after six months on the space station, according to NASA.

Two astronauts, NASA’s Jeff Williams and Russia’s Maxim Suraev, will remain on the space station until the arrival of Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov, NASA’s Timothy J. Creamer, and Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency on Dec. 21. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-12/01/content_12571381.htm

A meteor streaks past stars in the night sky at the Mont-Tendre near Montricher in the Jura, north of Geneva, late August 12, 2009. The Perseid meteor shower is sparked every August when the Earth passes through a stream of space debris left by Comet Swift-Tuttle. This picture was taken using a long exposure and a fisheye lens. ©Reuters

BEIJING, August 13 — The Perseid meteor shower, an annual event being tracked by astronomers for centuries, peaks this week.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the Perseids may be the best meteor watching event of the year, according to news reports on Thursday.

The phenomenon, which happens each summer as the Earth’s orbit takes it through debris scattered by the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle, had been due to reach its peak early Thursday morning.

The meteors appear to come from a point called a “radiant” in the constellation of Perseus — therefore it is named Perseid.

No special equipment was needed to watch the shower, which occurs when Earth passes through a stream of dusty debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle.

Amateur astronomers worldwide showed their passions for the greatest concentration of Perseid meteors on Twitter, the networking website, where astronomers posted their sightings. One lucky England stargazer in Chelmsford, Essex, reported seeing 20 meteors in 40 minutes. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-08/13/content_11873734.htm

Space shuttle Endeavour is pictured after mission managers scrubbed another launch attempt at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida July 13, 2009. Lightning strikes and thunderstorms near the seaside launch pad forced NASA on Monday to delay yet again the launch of shuttle Endeavour on a mission to the International Space Station. ©Reuters

BEIJING, July 15 — NASA plans to try the sixth time early Wednesday evening to launch space shuttle Endeavour with seven astronauts on board, media reports said.

NASA has cancelled the launch of Endeavour for the fifth time Monday due to thunderstorms near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The mission was postponed three times by thunderstorms and two times by hydrogen gas leaks.

NASA hopes the weather would finally cooperate Wednesday. Forecast shows the odds of good weather on Wednesday evening is 60 percent.

If the shuttle’s sixth launch attempt failed, it would set the record.

The shuttle must be launched by Wednesday or it will have to wait for a Russian supply run to the International Space Station.

The mission of Endeavour is to deliver spare parts to the space station and a last segment of the Japanese Kibo lab.

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-07/15/content_11711205.htm