HorsePerson and the ShoeMan

The past few days have been just unbelievable. There was so much stuff, I could hardly keep up. So while, unfortunately, there is always depressing discussions about budget, on the brighter side, the Mars Rover finally released itself from the sand dunes.
Here are a few other interesting things:

Where is the Neutron Star?

A search for the remains of a nearby stellar explosion has come up empty. Astronomers observed the blast site of the supernova, SN 1987A, with the Hubble space Telescope, but could not find any sign of the dense stellar core.

"We think a neutron star was formed. The question is: Why don't we see it?" astronomer Genevieve Graves of the University of California at Santa Cruz said Monday.

Comets 101

On July 4, the Deep Impact mission will smash a probe into Tempel 1, a potato-shaped comet discovered in 1867 and believed to be representative of most comets.
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Scientists also hope to discover what the interior of Tempel 1 — and by extension, other comets — is like. Is it porous like a pile of sand? Or solid and more like an icecube?
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To find out, scientists will blast a crater in one and see what happens. Yeomans explained that nearly every aspect of the blast will yield valuable information...

Merging Stars

The stars of a binary system of white dwarfs might collide and merge in about 500,000 to one million years from now after dancing around each other in an increasing gravitational spin. Don't miss out on the movie.

Hayabusa Probe Closing In on Itokawa

A celestial “smash-and-grab” space mission that could become the greatest triumph in the history of the Japanese space program is entering its most challenging stage in deep space.
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The Hayabusa probe is slowly closing in on a distant asteroid named Itokawa. Within a few months ... Hayabusa will swoop down to its surface and grab samples of the dirt for return to Earth, like a spacefaring bird of prey. In fact, the spacecraft's name comes from the Japanese word for "peregrine falcon."
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The probe uses an ion-drive system pioneered by NASA’s Deep Space 1 comet scout, but with a distinctive design innovation. It is the first probe to use microwaves to ionize the xenon fuel.

Categories: space