... Venus: Just Passing By . ... Credit: Galileo Project , JPL , NASA Explanation: Venus, the second closest planet to the Sun , is a popular way-point for spacecraft headed for the gas giant planets in the outer reaches of the solar system. Why visit Venus first? ... The Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft just completed its own flyby of Venus on April 26 . ... Publications with keywords: cassini spacecraft - Venus - Galileo . Publications with words: cassini spacecraft - Venus - Galileo . ...

... May 1, 1998 . Venus: Just Passing By . ... Explanation: Venus, the second closest planet to the Sun , is a popular way-point for spacecraft headed for the gas giant planets in the outer reaches of the solar system. ... Using a " gravity assist " maneuver, spacecraft can swing by planets and gain energy during their brief encounter saving fuel for use at the end of their long interplanetary voyage. ... The Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft just completed its own flyby of Venus on April 26 . ...

... Planets . ... Earth Satellites . ... The newly discovered ?mega-Earth? ... Its sibling, the lava world Kepler-10b, is in the background (the two planets? proximity is grossly exaggerated) .€а Kepler-10c has a diameter of about 29 000 km, 2.3 times as large as Earth, and weighs 17 times as much. ... The first mega-earth to be discovered is Kepler-10c which orbits a star lying about 560 light years from the Sun in the constellation Draco. ... Astronomers Find a New Type of Planet: The ?Mega-Earth? ...

... Over the past 16 years, astronomers have found more than 700 planets outside of our Solar System. We call these distant worlds exo-planets . ... For example, they can observe how a star dims when a planet passes in front of it. ... In this new method, astronomers use stars like magnifying glasses! ... And astronomers can tell if the star that is acting like a magnifying glass has a planet in orbit around it, as the power of the magnification is even greater! ...

... STScI-PRC99-27 A CLOSER ENCOUNTER WITH MARS Taking advantage of Mars's closest approach to Earth in eight years, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have taken the space-based observatory's sharpest views yet of the Red Planet. ... In these views the north polar cap is tilted toward the Earth and is visible prominently at the top of each picture. ... Dark sand dunes that surround the polar cap merge into a large, dark region called Acidalia. ...

... An artificial comet holds secrets to Earths life . ... Astronomers recently discovered that Scholz's star passed close to the Sun 70,000 years ago. Wouldn't its gravity have sent Oort Cloud comets raining into the inner planets? ... COMETS | OORT CLOUD . Based on the number of long-period comets that enter the inner solar system, astronomers estimate there are probably trillions of them in the Oort Cloud. Get instant access to subscriber content on Astronomy.com! ... Discover | ...

This is a new popup window - close it when you are done . Submitted by Robert Halstead on 06/30/2015 23:19:35 . Planets Passing in the Night, June 30, 2015 . ... Captured using my Canon 6D at the prime focus of my 8-inch f/10 Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. ISO 1600, 0.6 seconds for the image at the left; and ISO 400, 1/50 second for the image at the right. Images captured between 8:57 and 9:02 pm EDT on June 30, 2015. ... Copyright (c) Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, Inc. ...

... PLE: Just another reminder about the Penumbral Lunar Eclipse on March 14 - 15. ... The moon passes completely inside the penumbra, or 'partial shadow', of the Earth, but no part of it actually enters the umbra, which would give a partial eclipse. ... 22 March, 7.30 p.m., Lecture Room 5, Stranmillis College, Belfast: IAA Public Lecture, "The Solar Wind: from Explosions on the Sun to Us", by the redoubtable Dr Miruna Popescu of Armagh Observatory (Doctorate just awarded - congratulations!) ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... Keep Bad Astronomy close to your heart, and help make me filthy rich. ... It's semi-common knowledge that stars twinkle and planets don't. By semi-common, I mean that a lot of folks know that, but I also mean it isn't strictly true. Stars twinkle because we see them from the bottom of a sea of air. ... These small bundles of air act like little lenses, bending light as it passes through them. ... What we see is the light from the star flickering. ...

... When the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by the planet Uranus in January 1986, astronomers were treated to their first close-up glimpse of the satellites that orbit the seventh planet. ... But by far the most intriguing of those 15 satellites was a jigsaw-puzzle world called Miranda . ... How dark was it at Miranda? One of the Voyager scientists put it this way: Taking pictures in the Uranus system is like trying to do photography in a ballpark at night when the only light comes from a single candle. ...

... Spacecraft . ... To space by cannon? Finally, the deep space explorers --spacecraft which break away from the Earth's gravity . ... The "Luna" series of the USSR conducted 7 soft landing of unmanned probes, two of them with wheeled robotic "Lunokhods," and two of those missions returned samples to Earth. Others spacecraft have visited the major planets of the Solar system. ... The Mariner series have explored Venus and Mars--and Mariner 10 even reached Mercury, for three separate encounters! ...

... 1.2 Completed Five Sets of STIS/CCD 8808 (POMS Test Proposal: STIS Non-Scripted Parallel Proposal Continuation III) The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (CCD) was used to make non-scripted, parallel observations as part of a POMS test proposal. ... 1.6 Completed STIS/CCD 8870 (POMS Test Proposal: STIS Non-Scripted Parallel Proposal Continuation IV) The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (CCD) was used to make non-scripted, parallel observations as part of a POMS test proposal. ...

... There are several explanations for these X--ray quiet PMS stars. To examine the explanations, it is proper to divide the PMS stars into three groups: those bluer than R - I = 0.7, those redder than the X--ray sources (R - I > 1.25) and those with colors similar to the X--ray sources. ... A total of 26 of the non--X--ray detected PMS candidates had spectra taken. ... Between V=14 and V=16, I find 25 stars which are X--ray sources and estimate 19 non--X--ray PMS stars. ...

... Astrophysics Group . ... Pulsars . ... Stars ? ... The array was designed to detect compact radio sources such as these by virtue of the fact that they would scintillate (twinkle) when observed from the Earth through the interplanetary medium ? ... One of Antony Hewish?s research students, Jocelyn Bell, was set the task of operating the telescope and inspecting the daily charts for the kind deflections in the trace which occurred when a scintillating source passed over the array. ...

The Bringer of Peace V enus is the second planet from the Sun and the sixth largest. ... S ince Venus is an inferior planet, it shows phases when viewed with a telescope from the perspective of Earth. ... T he pressure of Venus' atmosphere at the surface is 90 atmospheres (about the same as the pressure at a depth of 1 km in Earth's oceans). ... Craters on Venus seem to come in bunches indicating that large meteoriods that do reach the surface usually break up in the atmosphere. ... Earth .. ...

... This is usually defined as the direction pointing toward the center of the primary body. ... NODE: The place where the plane of one orbit crosses the plane of another. ... ORBITAL PLANE: The flat surface that would result if every point on the orbit of a body was connected to the center of its primary. ... PENUMBRA: The edge of the primary body's shadow. ... PERIOD : The time required for one body to orbit the primary body. ... PROBE: A vessel designed to pass and observe an astronomical object. ...

Asteroid 2055 YU55 passes close by Earth; how close did it get? ... As Elizabeth Flock reported: An asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier missed Earth by only 200,000 miles as it flew by Tuesday night the closest an asteroid has been to Earth in 200 years Asteroid 2005 YU55, as it has been dubbed, streaked by at about 30,000 mph, but some scientists and lucky amateur astronomers caught a glimpse in their telescopes, where they saw strange structures on the asteroid\u2019s dark-colored surface. ...

... NASA SPACECRAFT FINDS NEW EVIDENCE FOR WATER ICE ON MERCURY . ... The new data indicate the water ice in Mercury's polar regions, if spread over an area the size of Washington, D.C., would be more than 2 miles thick," said David Lawrence, a MESSENGER participating scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., and lead author of one of three papers describing the findings. ... Water ice concentrations are derived from the hydrogen measurements. ...

ATNF Annual Report 2000 (submitted) . ... One of the first products is the HIPASS {\it Bright Galaxy Catalogue}, which is a catalogue of the 1000 apparently brightest HI galaxies in the southern hemisphere. ... In Figure 1 we show the spatial distribution of the brightest HIPASS galaxies. ... Figure 4 shows the velocity distribution of the 1000 brightest HIPASS galaxies (orange) compared to the 1000 brightest optical galaxies (selected from the Lyon/Meudon Extragalactic Database using blue magnitude). ...

... More on 51 Peg: . The discovery of a Jupiter--mass planet in orbit around the solar--type star 51Peg has been reported by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (Geneva Observatory) on October 6th at the 9th Cambridge workshop on "cool stars, stellar systems, and the sun" held at Florence (Italy). ... Recall that the measurements of radial velocity only yield v sin i which in turn gives us M sin i. For most values of i, sin i will be greater than 0.5 and this gives a mass estimate of 0.5 Jupiter masses. ...