Popular Fun Activities

Current Events In Astronomy

Astronomy can be like a professional sport. A lot of people love to keep up with it on a day to day basis. Interesting stories hit the news each day. That includes new images brought in from satellites and telescopes, new discoveries about the nature of planets and stars and other objects, as well as breakthroughs and just every day small progress in the tools and techniques used to make these discoveries.

A good place to find out about a lot of this is on NASA’s website. NASA both breaks the news and makes the news when it comes to astronomy and space. In November of 2008, NASA listed these events.

Tops on the list of current events in astronomy was the shuttle Endeavor’s launch. Refueling the International Space Station was its goal. There were a number of spacewalks for routine maintenance outside the station. Space walks are not just spacewalks they are also learning experiences that apply to future missions. Space station work includes a lot of astronomy work.

The Hubble telescope chimed in to current events in astronomy with an amazing discovery. For the first time in history, a telescope took a visible light image of a planet orbiting another star. It all began in the 1980s when IRAS, a NASA satellite telescope, used infrared to discover dust around the star. Scientists knew this was a sure sign that planets might circle the sun.

Current and events in astronomy can also be about what happened a long time ago. NASA announced details of a Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project designed to restore images of the moon taken by five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that visited the moon in 1966 and 1967. Much of the data was removed from the tape drives in the 1980’s, but stored as analogue images and only partially restored. NASA has already shown off some of these images.

Astronomy is as big as the universe it covers. Current events in astronomy go on forever. Always looked to the sky!