Just a few days ago the Soyuz TMA-15 carried three additional crew members to the International Space Station.  The launch was from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

When the hatch between the Soyuz and the ISS was opened what was known as Expedition 19 became Expedition 20 and marks the first time all five of the international partner agencices (NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency) are represented on orbit.

A cosmic ghost as seen by Chandra. Click for larger. Image Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/IoA/A.Fabian et al.); Optical (SDSS), Radio (STFC/JBO/MERLIN)

A cosmic ghost shows in X-rays and is captured by Chandra.   I’ll let them explain.

The Chandra press release:

This is a composite image showing a small region of the Chandra Deep Field North. Shown in blue is a deep image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and in red is an image from the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN) an array of radio telescopes based in Great Britain. An optical image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is shown in white, yellow and orange.

The diffuse blue object near the center of the image is believed to be a cosmic “ghost” generated by a huge eruption from a  supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy. This X-ray ghost, a.k.a. HDF 130, remains after powerful radio waves from particles traveling away from the black hole at almost the speed of light, have died off. As the electrons radiate away their energy they produce X-rays by interacting with the pervasive sea of photons remaining from the Big Bang – the cosmic background radiation. Collisions between these electrons and the background photons can impart enough energy to the photons to boost them into the X-ray energy band. The cigar-like shape of HDF 130 and its length of about 2.2 million light years are consistent with the properties of radio jets.
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National Geographic Channel has new shows of “The Worlds Toughest Fixes” series that premiered last year. of shows coming up and the very first one is called “The Worlds Toughest Fixes: Satellite Launch”.

The trailer looks very good indeed.  Be sure to mark you calendars for Thursday, June 4th at 9:00 pm ET.and I already have the auto-tune programmed.

This promises to be very good indeed!

Visit the Worlds Toughest Fixes website.

Clouds on Titan. Click for larger. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

I like this Cassini image of Titan, it’s a far cry from the speck of light I see when I look at it.

Not that the speck of light is bad, right now seeing anything up there would be great.  I am on vacation for a couple of weeks and this first one has been nothing but rain and a lot of it.

Here’s the Cassini press release:

Cloud streaks stand out on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

The tropospheric clouds seen in the lower left of the image are located at 45 to 55 degrees south latitude on Titan, and the streaks of the clouds are oriented east-west. This view looks toward the south pole of Titan. The pole lies near the terminator about a quarter of the way inward from the planet’s limb at the bottom of this image.

For a movie of tropospheric cloud activity near Titan’s south pole, see South Polar Cloud Movie.

Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Titan (5150 kilometers, or 3200 miles across). The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 24, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 78 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.

Radio images: A. Brunthaler, MPIfR)”]

A Hubble Space Telescope image (left) of the galaxy M82 shows hydrogen gas (red) breaking out from the central starburst (box), a region of intense star formation. A May 2008 VLA image of the starburst region (top left) clearly shows the supernova (SN 2008iz), which probably exploded in January 2008. The two high-resolution VLBA images (lower right) show an expanding shell at the scale of a few light days and proves that the transient source was the result of a supernova. (Milde Science Communication; HST Image: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team [STScI/AURA

Cool!

Rare radio supernova is nearest supernova in five years

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 27 May 2009

BERKELEY — The chance discovery last month of a rare radio supernova – an exploding star seen only at radio wavelengths and undetected by optical or X-ray telescopes – underscores the promise of new, more sensitive radio surveys to find supernovas hidden by gas and dust.

“This supernova is the nearest supernova in five years, yet is completely obscured in optical, ultraviolet and X-rays due to the dense medium of the galaxy,” said Geoffrey Bower, assistant professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and coauthor of a paper describing the discovery in the June issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. “This just popped out; in the future, we want to go from discovery of radio supernovas by accident to specifically looking for them.”

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KAGUYA's expected impact location. Click for larger (61k). Image credit: JAXA

. . .on purpose.

Japan’s space agency, JAXA has a spacecraft called KAGUYA carrying out observations of the moon from lunar orbit.

KAGUYA’s mission began when it launched on September 14, 2007, providing stunning High-Definition views during the mission.  The mission is in an extened operational phase at the moment and has been providing data from a lower lunar orbit since February 1, 2009.

The mission will end with a controlled impact with the lunar surface.  The exact time and location is subject to change in the next couple of weeks, but right now it is expected to conclude by impact on June 10, 2009 at 18:30 GMT.

The image above from JAXA shows the current projection for the impact.

I will try and keep the date and location updated.  Check out the mission pages at the SELENE Project homepage.