Hasta La Gadget!

NASA’s MESSENGER space craft is beaming back pictures of the planet Mercury that reveal a side of the planet we’ve never seen before–including a huge impact crater and remnants of volcanic activity, according to Space.com.

The craft is the first to visit Mercury in more than 30 years, and is going a long way toward demonstrating that the diminutive planet isn’t as much like our own moon as we thought it was.

Among the craft’s findings are that Mercury’s crust was largely
created through volcanism, as past eruptions spewed lava which later dried, the report said. The impact crater, meanwhile, is more than 430 miles in diameter–roughly the distance from Boston to D.C., as the article points out–and was probably formed about 3.9 billion years ago in the early stages of our solar system.

NASA’s Swift Observatory detected a gamma-ray burst from a supernova last Thursday, one that astronomers have now confirmed is more than 13 billion years old, according to Scientific American.

Scientists first knew that the burst, called GRB 090423 (the date it was first detected), was unusual when it wasn’t being picked up by any optical telescopes. Like many gamma-ray bursts, this one was short lived, lasting just seconds, according to the report. The burst’s age puts it just 600 million years after the birth of the universe.

“Swift was designed to catch these very distant bursts,” NASA’s Swift lead
scientist Neil Gehrels, of the Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement. “The incredible distance to this
burst exceeded our greatest expectations–it was a true blast from the
past.”

Static cling makes lunar dust stick to the instruments astronauts use to conduct experiments on the moon, according to a new survey of 40-year-old Apollo mission data. Brian O’Brien, a now-independent researcher in Floreat, Western Australia, and a former professor of space science at Rice University in Houston, determined that the angle of the sun in the lunar sky modulates the “clinginess” of lunar dust, Scientific American reports.

Since the moon has little atmosphere, solar radiation hits the lunar surface and gives it a clingy electrostatic charge, the report said. If O’Brien’s theory proves correct, this will be a larger problem for future manned missions than it was back in the Apollo days, when astronauts undertook them in the “morning” (roughly equivalent to a month here on earth, according to the article). The solution? You guessed it: a shed. “A sun-proof shed may provide dust-free working environments on the moon,” O’Brien said.

Hubble has picked up a galaxy collision here or there over the past 19 years, but none stranger than the one pictured here. Called Arp 194, the trio of galaxies give the impression that one of them has sprung a leak, as ScienceDaily reports.

“The bright blue streamer is really a stretched spiral arm full of
newborn blue stars,” the report said. “This typically happens when two galaxies interact
and gravitationally tug at [each other].” In fact, all of the galaxies pictured were likely distorted already from a prior collision, according to the article.

In addition, it turns out that what appears to be the third galaxy in the trio is actually further away and in the distance–something that Hubble’s resolution alone can help astronomers sort out. Arp 194 is located in the constellation of Cepheus and is about 600 million light-years away from Earth, the report said. To date, Hubble has taken over 570,000 photos of 29,000 celestial objects. (Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

NASA originally projected that the Mars Exploration Rovers would last 90 days once on the surface of the red planet. Today, both rovers are still doing science five years after their arrival. Spirit is now driving on a plateau called Home Plate in the
Inner Basin valley, according to the Washington Post, while Opportunity has left
Victoria Crater on the other side of the planet, and is motoring toward
a much larger crater called
Endeavour.

Spirit, the less-healthy of the two, has a bunch of minor to moderate issues. They include a broken wheel, some flaky sensors and software, and enough dust on its solar panels to limit its power to 30 percent of normal, the report said. Each night, the two rovers sleep to conserve energy since there is little sunlight–but from April 9th to 11th, Spirit wouldn’t wake up. It’s working again, though scientists working on the program may never find out what happened.

That’s not necessarily a problem. When Spirit’s wheel broke three years ago, the other five wheels dragged the broken one across the surface, which gouged a trench along the way–revealing a silica that proved to be evidence of ancient hot springs, according to the article. “When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade,” said John Callas, project manager for the Mars rovers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in the report.