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BY STEPHEN DEAL
IT MAY look like a speck of dust on the camera lens, but the tiny, pale
blue dot in this photo is Earth, the farthest away it has ever been seen.
The picture was taken by ultra- high - powered cameras on board the Cassini
spacecraft, which is orbiting Saturn nearly l.5billion km (930 million miles)
from our planet. 'Nothing has greater power to alter our perspective of ourselves
and our place in the cosmos than these images of Earth we collect from faraway
places like Saturn,' said Carolyn Porco, who is in charge of analysing Cassini
images at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The Cassini probe
- a joint mission between Nasa and the European Space Agency - was launched
in 1997 and is spending four years examining Saturn. Yesterday, scientists
revealed that the craft had also taken pictures of a new ring around Saturn
- a faint trail of particles just visible between some of its better-known
rings. Cassini caught sight of the ring and other rare features when the
Sun passed directly behind Saturn and provided bright backlight to the rings.
Saturn has 47 known moons and at least seven rings. The new images can be
seen at www.nasa.gov/cassini
[The Metro Sep21,2006]
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Atlantis back on Earth as mission ends |
SIX astronauts returned to Earth safely on the shuttle Atlantis yesterday following their space mission. The crew had spent 11 days making repairs to the international space station. Commander Brent Jet said: 'It's nice to he back,' immediately after touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was the the third shuttle mission since the Columbia disaster. |
Big Bang mystery is solved |
| ONE of the riddles about the
Big
Bang theory of how the universe began has been solved by astronomers
using the Hubble telescope. Until now it was not known how the universe survived
the release of cold hydrogen gases that followed the cosmic explosion. But
Hubble scientists can now see more than 500 galaxies that existed when the
universe was only a billion years old. This number of galaxies - which translates
to about 500rnillion stars - would have been enough to reheat the hydrogen
to create the warm transparent plasma that today we call 'space'. Just a
decade ago, astronomers had not seen one galaxy from as long ago as this.
The light from the young stars took nearly 13billion years to reach Earth.
But the power of Hubble means many more of the universe's mysteries will
soon be unravelled. |