Next Generation Astronomy Missions

Two astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., Dr. Marc Postman and Dr. Ken Sembach, have been selected among 19 science teams to conduct year-long studies of new concepts for NASA's next generation of major observatories. The studies will help the agency make decisions about how it explores the heavens in the future, following the Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey. Postman's group will study the feasibility of building the Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope (ATLAS Telescope), which will have more than 40 times the sensitivity of the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope would have a primary mirror that could be as large as 16 meters in diameter, and could be carried aboard NASA's planned Ares V heavy-lift launch vehicle. The telescope would be located 1 million miles away at a gravitational balancing point in space called L2, where the James Webb Space Telescope will be perched when it is launched in 2013. More... The moon has impact wrinkles

The moon has impact wrinkles

Wrinkles on the moon could reveal secrets regarding devastating impacts that also ravaged Earth and other planets in their early days. These impacts could have scoured life from the young Earth-but they might have also planted the ingredients for life as well, scientists said today at a European conference. The researchers focused on giant basins on the moon believed to be wounds from the "lunar cataclysm," a time 3.8 billion to 4.2 billion years ago when the moon suffered heavy bombardment from asteroids or comets. There are roughly 50 recognizable lunar basins more than 186 miles (300 kilometers) wide, most of which are thought to date from then. To learn more about these basins, the researchers peered at pictures taken by a microcamera on SMART-1, a European Space Agency satellite that orbited the moon from 2004 to 2006. They combined data from these images with records from the U.S. Clementine space probe, which looked at visible, ultraviolet and infrared light from the moon during 1994 and measured its gravitational field to determine the makeup and concentration of minerals in the lunar surface. 

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