ESA : Herschel in pictures

19 September 2007
The following images have been released on the occasion of the Herschel Industrial Media Day in Friedrichshafen on 19 September 2007.

The Herschel spacecraft

Click on the image to access high-resolution files and full captions.

Herschel

Herschel operating at the second Lagrange point (L2)

Herschel

Sun, Earth and the spacecraft are aligned

Inside Herschel

Herschel in space, close up on its mirror

Herschel's cryostat vacuum vessel, its instruments and mirror

Click on the image to access high-resolution files and full captions.

Herschel’s sophisticated cooling system

Herschel’s sophisticated cooling system

Herschel’s sophisticated cooling system

Herschel's instruments

Integrating the instruments

Herschel’s telescope

Herschel's intruments, its solar array and launch configuration

Click on the image to access high-resolution files and full captions.

HIFI

HIFI

PACS

Artist’s impression of PACS

The SPIRE focal plane unit

Artist’s impression of SPIRE

Herschel's solar array and sunshade

Herschel & Planck launch configuration

ESA : Dealing with threatening space rocks

Challenging asteroids - Don Quijote

20 September 2007
Every now and then a space rock hits the world's media – sometimes almost literally. Threatening asteroids that zoom past the Earth, fireballs in the sky seen by hundreds of people and mysterious craters which may have been caused by impacting meteorites; all make ESA's planned mission Don Quijote look increasingly timely.

The uncertainty surrounding whether a meteorite impacted in South America recently highlights the need to know more about these pieces of natural space debris and their trajectories. ESA has always been interested in such endeavours and conducted a number of studies into how it might best help.

Those studies showed that it is probably the smaller pieces of rock, at most a few hundred metres across, rather than the larger ones that we should be more worried about for the time being. A worldwide network of astronomers is currently cataloguing most of the larger objects, those above 1 km in diameter. A number of survey telescopes have taken up the challenge to detect as many as 90 percent of all near Earth objects down to a size of 140 metres by around 2020. Only after this time will we know whether space-based observatories will be needed to find the rest.

	Peru crater

Part of the trouble with these small chunks of rock is fixing their orbits. From the ground, it is very difficult – sometimes impossible – to determine their trajectory with enough precision to rule out impacts with our planet in the years to come. So, ESA have been concentrating on a mission to actually 'mark a cross' on small asteroids and check the state of the art of our technology. The Don Quijote mission is a project based on two phases. In the first phase, a spacecraft would rendezvous with an asteroid and go into orbit around it. It would monitor the asteroid for several months, precisely determining its position, shape, mass and gravity field.


In the second phase, another spacecraft would slam into the asteroid at a speed of around 10 km/s, while the first spacecraft watches, looking for any changes in the asteroid's trajectory. In this way, a mission involving two spacecraft would attempt to be the first to actually move an asteroid.

An orbiter to rendezvous with an asteroid

In preparation for dealing with small asteroids, ESA's Don Quijote is also starting small. In its current design, the first spacecraft, Sancho, could reach any one of 5 or 6 small, nearby asteroids. Each one is no larger than a few hundred metres in diameter. At present, the mission planners have chosen to concentrate on Apophis, a small asteroid that can swing dangerously close to Earth on the outwards stretch of its orbit around the Sun.

If it becomes a reality, Don Quijote could launch sometime early in the next decade. Sancho would take some 25 months to reach its target. Once there, it would begin its groundbreaking study – both literally and metaphorically.

"The idea is to get the technology ready before you really need it," says Ian Carnelli, Technical Officer for the Don Quijote mission at ESA.

In 1908, a 20-metre asteroid impacted the uninhabited Tunguska forest in Siberia, toppling trees and causing total devastation over an area of two thousand square kilometres. Scientists predict this type of event to occur about every 150 years. Next year's 100th anniversary of that impact will be yet another reminder of the need to learn about and become ready to deal with asteroids – even the small ones.

Space.com : Disposable Russian Cargo Ship Departs Space Station

Disposable Russian Cargo Ship Departs Space Station By Tariq Malik Staff Writer posted: 19 September 2007 10:43 a.m. ET

A trash-filled Russian cargo ship destined for destruction cast off from the International Space Station (ISS) late Tuesday to help prime the orbital laboratory for the arrival of a new crew next month.

The unmanned Progress 25 supply ship undocked from the aft end of the space station's Russian-built Zvezda service module at 8:37 p.m. EDT (0037 Sept. 19 GMT).

Russian flight controllers plan to put the disposable space freighter through a week-long series of propulsion maneuvers before commanding Progress 25 to plunge into Earth's atmosphere and burn up during reentry.

"It's for engineering testing and to gather data about the propulsion system," NASA spokesperson Kylie Clem told SPACE.com of Progress 25's extra week in space.

The cargo ship's Tuesday departure clears a berth for a Soyuz spacecraft swap as the space station's Expedition 15 astronauts prepare for the arrival of their relief crew next month.

Expedition 15 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineers Oleg Kotov and Clayton Anderson will move their Russian-built Soyuz TMA-10 spacecraft from its Earth-facing berth on the station's Zarya control module to Progress 25's former port.

That move, scheduled for Sept. 27, will clear a space for the incoming Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson, flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko and Malaysian astronaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor. The Expedition 16 crew and Shukor are due to launch toward the ISS on Oct. 10 and dock two days later.

Shukor, Malaysia's first astronaut, will return to Earth with Yurchikhin and Kotov while Anderson stays aboard the ISS to join the Expedition 16 crew.

Meanwhile, space station flight controllers decided Tuesday that the ISS would not have to have to fire its engines to distance itself from an old Strela rocket component drifting in Earth orbit. On Monday, mission managers were concerned that the spent rocket stage could pose a debris risk for the ISS. But after further analysis, the space junk's trajectory was found to steer it well clear of the station, NASA said.

Progress 25 arrived at the space station in May to deliver more than 2.5 tons of fresh supplies to the Expedition 15 crew. Its Tuesday departure left two Russian spacecraft - the Soyuz TMA-10 and a newer Progress 26 cargo ship - still docked at the space station.

Space.com : NASA Clean Rooms Loaded with Microbial Stowaways

NASA Clean Rooms Loaded with Microbial Stowaways By Dave Mosher Staff Writer posted: 19 September 2007 06:50 am ET

NASA builds its spacecraft in some of the tidiest rooms on Earth, but a few microbial stowaways always manage to survive and sneak a ride into space.

That could be because the space agency's super-sterile "clean rooms" nonetheless support a greater variety of microbes than previously thought, researchers have now found. And, there more of them than expected. NASA is cataloging the potential hitchhikers as a result, so they can be easily sorted from potential extraterrestrial life that might one day be detected somewhere in the solar system.

"These findings will advance the search for life on Mars and other worlds," said study co-author Kasthuri Venkateswaran, a microbiologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Venkateswaran and his group's findings are detailed in a recent issue of the journal FEMS Microbiology Ecology.

Some like it clean

Most bacteria prefer plenty of food and fresh air, but some love "extreme" environments and thrive on just the paint and leftover cleaning solvents found in some NASA clean rooms. Some of the rooms, in which the air is continuously filtered, harbor fewer than 10 particles per cubic foot (0.03 cubic meter)--that's about 100,000 fewer dust particles than an equal cube of outdoor air.

Catharine Conley, an astrobiologist and planetary protection officer at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said a lack of competition may cause the super-clean bugs' surprising diversity.

"The techniques used to identify microbes almost always miss the less common ones," Conley told SPACE.com.

Normal microbe sampling is like choosing animals from a room filled with 1,000 dogs and only 3 cats, she said, and "if you pull 10 animals out of that crowd, they're all probably going to be dogs."

When most of the common bacteria (dogs) are gone, however, the remaining extreme bacteria (cats) thrive on the lack of competition and show up more readily in samples.

Planetary protection

To map the diversity of clean room microbes, biologists got on their hands and knees and swabbed large areas of NASA clean rooms across the nation.

Instead of trying to grow the unseen microbes, which is practically impossible to do, the scientists looked to a key genetic marker found in all bacteria called 16S ribosomal RNA.

Like the method that genomics researcher Craig Venter has used to assess the diversity of bacteria in the world's oceans, Venkateswaran and his colleagues multiplied the genetic markers and decoded the sequences. The result? About 193 unique sequences--indicating 193 different bacterial "species"--were discovered, at least 13 of which were not known to science before.

Conley said the study will be crucial to sorting out the hitchhikers from the real thing during future searches for microbial life on other worlds.

"It's very useful information. We need to know what microbes a spacecraft is taking with it out into the solar system," she said. Conley added that NASA is now cataloging every possible organism it can find in clean rooms, as such a list of critters will help prevent a spacecraft from incorrectly confirming extraterrestrial life in the event that it detects some of its stowaways.

Conley said keeping NASA's facilities even cleaner is a growing priority to prevent "forward contamination" of other worlds during future missions.

"We want to do whatever we can to make sure we don't introduce life to places like Europa or Mars," Conley said.

Universe Today : Supercomputer Will Simulate Colliding Black Holes

Written by Fraser Cain

You just know this is going to take some serious computer horsepower. Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation was recently awarded $330,000 from the National Science Foundation to simulate collisions between black holes. Dubbed "newHorizons", this will be a cluster of 85 dual core processors acting like a single large computer. 1.4 terabytes of memory; 36 terabytes of storage. Yowza.

Sorry to geek out there, I'm getting little tired of the computer sitting on my desk right now. But any upgrade I might buy won't hold a candle to this new supercomputer from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The project is headed up by Manuela Campanelli, who led her team to solve the 10 equations in Einstein's theory of general relativity for strong field gravity. She joined forces with physics professor David Merritt, who built the 32-node gravitySimulator, which calculations the gravitational interaction between objects, such as dark matter and galaxies.

As I mentioned in the intro, this new machine will consist of 85 nodes - individual computers with their own memory, processor - which are connected together. The latency, or delay, in communication between the individual computers is so low, that they can act like a single, large supercomputer - but built at a fraction of the cost.

Once newHorizons is built, the development team is expecting it'll be running 24 hours a day for 5 or 6 years, simulating black hole collisions and mergers. The extra horsepower will allow physicists to simulate more complex interactions with additional variables that would overwhelm other computers.

Original Source: RIT News Release

Universe Today : Neptune's South Pole is the Warmest Place on the Planet

Written by Fraser Cain

Here on Earth we think of the poles as cold places, but on Neptune, it's just the opposite. New images of the planet's southern pole show that it's actually 10-degrees warmer than the rest of Neptune. Now don't pack your bathing suit just yet, Neptune's average temperature is still -200 degrees Celsius (-328 F); so it's still really, really cold.

The images were gathered using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (now that's how you name a telescope). The observatory uses a special mid-infrared camera/spectrometer to reveal the different temperatures across planet.

Obviously Neptune is different from the Earth, but consider this. The planet is located 30 times farther away from the Sun than the Earth. This means only 1/900th the sunlight reaches Neptune than what we get here on Earth. Still, it's enough sunlight to warm up the southern pole, which is currently tilted towards the Sun.

It's been receiving the warmth from the Sun for about 40 years now, and the ongoing input of solar energy continuously heats up the polar region to the point that it's warmer than any other part of Neptune by about 10 degrees Celsius. This heating also whips up the planets winds into some of the strongest in the Solar System. On Neptune, winds can travel more than 2,000 km/hour, faster than any other planet - you definitely don't want to bring your swimsuit.

The temperatures in the region are high enough that methane gas, normally frozen out of the upper atmosphere, can actually leak out through the region. And this helps explain why scientists have seen abundances of this molecule in the atmosphere.

Original Source: ESO News Release

Universe Today: Google Maps are Going to Get Better After Today's Satellite Launch

Written by Fraser Cain

Come on, admit it, you've spent hours gazing at Google Maps and Google Earth, finding your house, school, and seeing what various building and features look like from space. And after today's launch of DigitalGlobe's WorldView-1, the resolution is going to get even better. In fact, it's going to have the highest resolution permitted by the US government to be installed on a commercial satellite - half a metre (20 inches).

How much better is this? Currently, the highest resolution commercial satellite images are taken by DigitalGlobe's Quickbird. It was originally slated to have a 1-metre resolution, but engineers were able to get better images by adjusting its orbit so that it flies a little closer to the ground. It's been able acquire images at 61 cm (about 2 feet). So, WorldView-1 will be able beat this resolution; the rumours say it's even better, but it's not permitted to take higher resolution images because of government regulations.

But more importantly, WorldView-1 can take a mountain of images, collecting up to 500,000 square kilometres (200,000 square miles) of imagery every day - 4.5 times the rate of any previous system. This means it'll be able to quickly fill in regions missed by other satellites.

The satellite will have many customers, including Google and the US Government, but it'll also be used by any number of urban planners, real estate developers and environmental monitors.

A Delta 2 rocket carrying WorldView-1 lifted off today at 11:35 PDT from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The rocket launched right on time, and there were no reported problems at the time that I wrote this up (it's about 81 km altitude and climbing quickly).

This is just the first of two missions. WorldView-2 will be launched in 2008.

Original Source: Ball Aerospace

Universe Today: The Northwest Passage is Open, and That's Not a Good Thing

Written by Fraser Cain

Here in Vancouver, we have a maritime museum with the first ship to completely circumnavigate North America, and the second vessel to complete a voyage through the Northwest Passage - the St. Roch. Their journey was long and difficult, taking 28 months to cross above North America. And just think, if they'd waited until now, they could sail right across with clear waters the whole way. Satellite photos show that Arctic ice levels have reached their lowest point in recorded history, opening up the Northwest Passage.

A mosaic of nearly 200 images captured by ESA's Envisat satellite was recently released to the public. Here's Leif Toudal Pedersen from the Danish National Space Centre, describing the ice coverage:

"We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around 3 million sq km which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006. There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100 000 sq km per year on average, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is extreme."

Arctic sea ice coverage rises and falls over the course of the year. During the cold northern winters, it extends, and then recedes in the relatively warmer summer. The total coverage of ice has been decreasing on average since the first satellite observations were made in 1978.

In the image attached with this story you can see a yellow line and a blue line. The yellow line indicates the path you can take across northern Canada to get around North America. And the blue line indicates the path you can take above the Siberian coast. The Siberian route is still partially blocked - at the dotted line. Just give it a few years, though.

Climate researchers were predicting that there might be an ice free passage above North America in the middle of the 21st century, not this summer. The loss of sea ice has beaten their predictions by about 40 years. Some researchers are predicting the Arctic will be completely ice free in 2070 - they might want to revise their predictions.

Okay, so an open Arctic might make some shipping routes cheaper, but it could have bad consequences for the environment. Sea ice reflects sunlight back into space much more efficiently than dark ocean. Without the reflectivity of the Arctic, global warming could accelerate. The warmer oceans will make it difficult for sea ice to reform, so the process is probably irreversible.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Universe Today : NASA is Looking for New Astronauts

Written by Fraser Cain

Have you got the right stuff? If you've got multiple advanced degrees, a body carved from a block of steel, tremendous experience flying jet aircraft, and strong stomach, you might want to consider signing up as a NASA astronaut. NASA announced today that they're now accepting applications for the 2009 Astronaut Candidate Class. These are the people who will be staffing the International Space Station, and heading back to the Moon.

Don't think this happens all the time. The last time NASA opened up applications for astronaut candidates (or ascans) was back in 2004. They brought in 11 US candidates and 3 international people out of thousands of applications. This time around, they're going to be looking to fill 15 positions or so.

The NASA press release links to the USAJOBS website. Here's the information from that website, including the salary range: $59,493.00 - $130,257.00 USD per year. Nice money.

Astronaut Candidate
SALARY RANGE:$59,493.00 - 130,257.00 USD per year
OPEN PERIOD: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 to Tuesday, July 01, 2008
SERIES & GRADE: GS-0801-11/14
POSITION INFORMATION: Full-Time - Permanent appointment
PROMOTION POTENTIAL: 15
DUTY LOCATIONS: Few vacancies - Houston
WHO MAY BE CONSIDERED:
This announcement is open to all qualified U.S citizens.

JOB SUMMARY:
NASA, the world's leader in space and aeronautics is always seeking outstanding scientists, engineers, and other talented professionals to carry forward the great discovery process that its mission demands. Creativity. Ambition. Teamwork. A sense of daring. And a probing mind. That's what it takes to join NASA, one of the best places to work in the Federal Government.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has a need for Astronaut Candidates to support the International Space Station (ISS) Program.

NASA uses the USAJobs resume as the basic application document. NASA limits resumes to the equivalent of about six typed pages, or approximately 22,000 characters (including spaces). You cannot complete the application process if your USAJobs resume is too long. More information about the NASA application process is also available under the "How to Apply" section of this announcement.

KEY REQUIREMENTS:
* Position subject to pre-employment background investigation
* U.S. citizenship is required
* This is a drug-testing designated position
* Frequent travel may be required
* Selectee must pass a pre-employment medical examination

So, unlike previous years, this one's only open to US citizens. I guess that rules me out.

Click here to access the job posting.

Hilariously, the press release lists the possible destinations you might travel to: "Texas, Florida, California, Russia, Kazakhstan, the International Space Station and the moon." Good to know.

The deadline to apply is July 1, 2008, so head out there and update your resume. Include the fact that you read Universe Today, that's got to be a big positive.

Original Source: NASA News Release

Universe Today : Life Marker Chip Heads to Space

Written by Fraser Cain

Would you know microbial life if you saw it? What if you were a robot? A newly developed "Life Marker Chip" might give future robotic explorers a tool they can use to know if the rock, sand, water or ice they're examining contains life. This device, as well as a few dozen other experiments recently headed to space aboard the Foton microgravity mission.

The unmanned Soyuz-U launcher blasted off from the Kaikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan on September 14th. 9 minutes after launch, the Foton-M3 spacecraft separated from the rocket's upper stage, and went into an orbit that takes it around the Earth every 90 minutes.

The spacecraft is carrying a payload of 43 experiments designed to test the effects of microgravity and radiation. The experiments include fluid physics, biology, protein crystal growth, meteoritics, radiation dosimetry and exobiology. And one interesting member of the mission is the Life Marker Chip.

The nickname for the Life Marker Chip is the Mars pregnancy test since it works on the same principle. It contains a tray of very specific proteins, each of which acts like a plug. If microbial life is present on Mars, some of its protein molecules will come into contact with the LMC, and then bond, like a very specific puzzle piece. This will allow the robot to not only report on evidence of life, but give very specific information about what kind of life process is being observed.

The trip to space on board the Foton is just a test. Scientists want to see what happens to the experiment when it's exposed to the radiation and microgravity of being in orbit. The experiment, as well as the other 40ish experiments on board the capsule will be recovered when the capsule returns to Earth on September 25th.

If everything works properly, the Life Marker Chip will be installed onto ESA's ExoMars mission; a rover that will blast off for the Red Planet in 2013. Maybe then we'll get the answer we're hoping for: Mars is pregnant… with life.

Original Source: Carnegie Institution News Release

Space.com : Milky Way Companions Just Passing Through

Milky Way Companions Just Passing Through By Jeanna Bryner Staff Writer posted: 18 September 2007 06:52 am ET

Two dwarf galaxies thought to be our Milky Way's longtime companions are actually relative newcomers to our neighborhood that are just passing through, according to a new study.

The surprising finding is a celestial curveball of sorts, sending astronomers back to the clubhouse in order to rework theories that were based on long-lasting interactions between the Milky Way and the dwarf galaxies, called the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

"We have known about the Clouds since the time of Magellan, and a single measurement has thrown out everything we thought we understood about their history and evolution," said the study's lead author, Gurtina Besla of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.

For instance, some astronomers thought a blazing trail of hydrogen gas extending from the Clouds, called the Magellanic Stream, formed due to tidal interactions between the Clouds and the Milky Way. Others explained the gas trail as the result of hydrogen being stripped from the Clouds by gas pressure as they plunged through the gas halo around our galaxy. Both scenarios are false if the galaxies are indeed just passing through.

Glowing clouds

Located about 160,000 light-years from Earth, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is only one-twentieth the diameter of our galaxy and contains one-tenth as many stars. The Small Magellanic Cloud resides 200,000 light-years from Earth and is about 100 times smaller than the Milky Way.

Earlier this year, astronomers making the most detailed measurements yet of the 3-dimensional velocities of the Magellanic Clouds found they are flying through space twice as fast as previously thought.

Besla's team incorporated the new estimates into computer models, finding that both galaxies had extremely parabolic orbits and indicated they had entered our neighborhood for the first time between 1 billion and 3 billion years ago.

"The problem is [the LMC] is moving at a velocity that would correspond to a parabolic orbit," Besla explained. "It's just moving too fast. If there were no other effects involved, it would just slingshot away." She added that friction forces from the Milky Way's gas halo and an observed loss of mass in the form of the Magellanic Stream slow down the galaxies.

Even still, with such elongated orbits, the galaxies are unlikely to boomerang back toward the Milky Way any time soon. "It will go out really far before it comes back around again and it will take an extremely long time ... on the order of like 8 billion years and beyond," Besla told SPACE.com.

One answer, many questions

The results have implications for at least two astrophysical phenomena.

Theories put forward to explain the Magellanic Stream involved a lengthy interaction between the Clouds and our galaxy. An alternative mechanism must be at work, Besla said.

The researchers suggest a type of stellar feedback. "As stars form they start losing a lot of material through stellar winds and they also explode and that blows out material," Besla said. "It's possible some of that material gets puffed out and then other effects like 'ram pressure' and tidal effects can then remove this really loosely bound stuff."

Tidal effects between large objects (such as the moon and Earth, or two galaxies) cause one side of an object to be tugged more than the other side, stretching it.

In addition, the LMC and SMC have served as laboratories for understanding how stars evolve. Unlike the Milky Way, which is continually churning out stars, the Magellanic Clouds have undergone several bursts of star formation followed by quiet periods.

"Those bursts had typically been linked to multiple passages around the Milky Way," Besla said. "Now that doesn't fly."

ESA : Herschel's heart and brain mated

Herschel

Herschel's heart and brain mated

19 September 2007
Herschel, Europe’s infrared space observatory is being presented to the media today in a joint press event by ESA and Astrium in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Two of the satellite’s most fundamental modules, its ‘heart’ and ‘brain’, have now been mated.

The far-infrared space observatory is ESA’s latest mission that will study the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies. Herschel will carry the largest telescope ever flown in space, giving astronomers their best view yet of the cold and most distant objects in the universe. It will collect very long infrared wavelengths, peeking into star-forming regions, galactic centres and planetary systems.

To protect the sensitive instruments from heat generated during operations and to achieve its challenging objectives, the satellite must operate at very low temperatures. This is why the spacecraft’s brain – or its payload module – hosts a cryostat, a cryogenic module inside which the cold components of the scientific instruments are mounted.

	Herschel's build-up

Inside the cryostat the sensitive instrument detectors are cooled down to about -273 ºC (0.3 degrees above absolute zero). This low temperature is achieved using superfluid helium (at about -271 ºC) and an additional cooling stage inside the focal plane units.

The service module is the spacecraft’s heart, which keeps the spacecraft going by caring for all its vital functions. It also carries the ‘warm’ components of the instruments – those that do not require cooling with the cryostat.

Between late July and early August this year, the cold and warm units of the instruments were mated with the cryostat and the service module respectively.

Last week, on 11 September, the cryostat containing the cold instrument units was finally mounted on the service module, mating Herschel’s heart and brain.

Herschel's cryostat and service module being mated

This fundamental step will be followed by functional and compatibility tests at Astrium before the spacecraft is sent to ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in November for final environmental (thermal, mechanical, acoustic) and functional acceptance tests.

In late December 2007 or early 2008, after the functional tests, the telescope and the solar arrays – two other fundamental parts of the payload module - will be mated to the rest of the spacecraft, completing Herschel.

Herschel is scheduled to launch from Europe’s spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana on 31 July 2008, on an Ariane 5 ECA launch vehicle. The launch will be shared with Planck, ESA’s mission that will study relic radiation from the Big Bang.

Take a look at the latest multimedia on Herschel

	Inside Herschel

Note for editors:

The Prime Contractor for Herschel is Thales Alenia Space (Cannes, France). It leads a consortium of industrial partners with Astrium (Germany) responsible for the Extended Payload Module (EPLM, including the Herschel cryostat), Astrium (France) responsible for the telescope, and the Thales Alenia Space industry branch of Torino, Italy, responsible for the Service Module (SVM). There is also a host of subcontractors spread throughout Europe.

The three instruments on Herschel were designed and built by consortia of scientists and institutes, with their own national funding. The Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) was developed under the coordination of the MPE, Germany; the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) was developed under the coordination of the Cardiff University, United Kingdom; and the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HIFI) under the coordination of SRON, Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

For more information:

Thomas Passvogel, ESA Herschel Project Manager Email: Thomas.Passvogel @ esa.int

Göran Pilbratt, ESA Herschel Project Scientist
Email: Gpilbratt @ rssd.esa.int

Herschel's cryostat and service module being mated

Herschel's cryostat and service module being mated

HIFI focal plane unit

PACS

SPIRE

NASA : Magnetic Trilobite

Sept. 18, 2007: "We've never seen anything quite like it," says solar physicist Lika Guhathakurta from NASA headquarters.

Last week she sat in an audience of nearly two hundred colleagues at the "Living with a Star" workshop in Boulder, Colorado, and watched in amazement as Saku Tsuneta of Japan played a movie of sunspot 10926 breaking through the turbulent surface of the sun. Before their very eyes an object as big as a planet materialized, and no one was prepared for the form it took.

"It looks like a prehistoric trilobite," said Marc De Rosa, a scientist from Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif. "To me it seemed more like cellular mitosis in which duplicated chromosomes self-assemble into two daughter cells," countered Guhathakurta.

Click on the image and decide for yourself:

Above: A magnetic map of emerging sunspot 10926 recorded by Hinode in Dec. 2006. From beginning to end, the 18 MB time-lapse movie spans 6 days. A shorter 5 MB version is also available. The "trilobite" centered above is about the size of Earth.

"This movie is a magnetogram—a dynamic map tracing the sunspot's intense magnetism," Guhathakurta explains. "Black represents negative (S) polarity, and white represents positive (N)."

The data were gathered by the Japanese Space Agency's Hinode spacecraft, launched in Sept. 2006 on a mission to study sunspots and solar storms. "This is the highest resolution magnetogram ever taken from space," says Tsuneta, Hinode's chief scientist at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo. "It's showing us things we've never seen before."

(Editor's note: Additional scientific discussion may be found in the "more information" box at the end of the story.)

Magnetograms are the best way to study sunspots. Why? Although sunspots may appear solid and sturdy, they are not made of matter. Sunspots are planet-sized knots of magnetism created by the sun's inner dynamo. Born in the depths, they bob to the solar surface where they can shift, merge, split and even appear to "swim."

"Sometimes the shifting and merging gets out of hand," says Guhathakurta. "Magnetic fields become unstable and explode, producing a powerful solar flare." The effects are manifold: flares can disrupt communications on Earth, disable satellites, threaten astronauts with deadly radiation storms and (on the bright side) trigger lovely aurora borealis--the Northern Lights. Although researchers have been studying flares for more than a century, they still cannot issue accurate flare forecasts--something astronauts in orbit or en route to the Moon would dearly love to have. Improving this situation is a key goal of the Hinode mission.

Participants at the Living With A Star workshop were amazed by the quality of Hinode's data. "The sensitivity of Hinode's Solar Optical Telescope is much higher than anything we've ever launched before. This allows Hinode to detect even the very faintest magnetic fields." By watching the ebb and flow of magnetism and the surprising forms that emerge, "we hope to understand the behavior of sunspots and predict their eruptions."

But first they've got to deal with the trilobites. "We have a lot of work to do," says Guhathakurta. "But what a wonderful problem."