News
NASA Selects Contractor for First Prometheus Mission to Jupiter
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., selected Northrop Grumman Space Technology, Redondo Beach, Calif., as the contractor for co-designing the proposed Prometheus Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) spacecraft. The contract award is for approximately $400 million, covering work through mid-2008.
Cold Sugar in Space Provides Clue to the Molecular Origin of Life
Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered a frigid reservoir of simple sugar molecules in a cloud of gas and dust some 26,000 light-years away, near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. The discovery suggests how the molecular building blocks necessary for the creation of life could first form in interstellar space.
The mouse that soared
Astronomers have used an X-ray image to make the first detailed study of the behavior of high-energy particles around a fast moving pulsar. The image, from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, shows the shock wave created as a pulsar plows through interstellar space at supersonic speed. These results will provide insight into theories for the production of powerful winds of matter and antimatter by pulsars...
The FITSview program is available free of charge from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
<b>Editor's Note:</b> None of the astronomical imaging programs I have allow me to do simple "blink" comparisons between 2 different images and though this simple FITSview program is far less sophisticated than, say, MaximDL, it does a good basic job of displaying .fit files AND it has a "blink-comparator" feature. Very handy when hunting for singular disparities between images.