Herschel’s ground station in Western Australia this afternoon found that the temperature in all of the telescope’s instruments is rising, confirming that the helium has run out. The depletion of the coolant was expected, as the 2300 litres of liquid helium inside the observatory had been evaporating since Herschel’s launch in 2009.

“Herschel has offered us a new view of the hitherto hidden Universe, pointing us to a previously unseen process of star birth and galaxy formation, and allowing us to trace water through the Universe from molecular clouds to newborn stars and their planet-forming discs and belts of comets,” said Göran Pilbratt, a Herschel Project Scientist at the ESA.

The telescope has been gazing into space for over three years. In just the past few months data from Herschel has been used to find starburst galaxies, examine a near-earth asteroid, discover massive comet belts, and link the 1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact to water on Jupiter.

“Herschel has exceeded all expectations, providing us with an incredible treasure trove of data that that will keep astronomers busy for many years to come,” said Alvaro Giménez Cañete, Director of Science and Robotic Exploration at the ESA.

(Image courtesy ESA)

The European Space Agency (ESA) today announced that the water in the Jovian planet’s upper atmosphere has been linked to the 1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts. The comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke up and collided with Jupiter in July of 1994. The week-long event, which was the first directly-seen extraterrestrial collision in the Solar System, was observed by astronomers around the world.

Though astronomers suspected the Shoemaker-Levy impacts were the source of the water, the ESA’s Herschel space observatory has now been able to map the vertical and horizontal distribution of the water in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The observatory’s infrared imaging was able to discern that there is two to three times more water in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere than in the northern hemisphere. Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, and Herschel has found “most” of the water is concentrated around the impact sites. The findings have been published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

“Only Herschel was able to provide the sensitive spectral imaging needed to find the missing link between Jupiter’s water and the 1994 impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9,” said Thibault Cavalié, lead author of the paper and an astrophysicist at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux. “The asymmetry between the two hemispheres suggests that water was delivered during a single event and rules out icy rings or moons as candidate sources.

“According to our models, as much as 95% of the water in the stratosphere is due to the comet impact.”

(Image courtesy ESA/Herschel/T. Cavalié et al./NASA/ESA/Reta Beebe)

Using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the ESA’s XMM-Newton, astronomers were able to observe the black hole that lies at the center of the galaxy NGC 1365. The object was found to be spinning nearly as fast as physics will allow, providing researchers with new information about how black holes behave.

“This is hugely important to the field of black hole science,” said Lou Kaluzienski, a NuSTAR program scientist at NASA Headquarters.

The measurements, to be published in the journal Nature, also provide clear evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The data shows that X-rays around the black hole are being warped by the object’s high gravity.

“We can trace matter as it swirls into a black hole using X-rays emitted from regions very close to the black hole,” said Fiona Harrison, coauthor of a new study, NuSTAR principal investigator of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “The radiation we see is warped and distorted by the motions of particles and the black hole’s incredibly strong gravity.”

Both the NuSTAR and XMM-Newton telescopes were needed to penetrate the gas clouds that obscure NGC 1365′s center. NuSTAR detects high-energy X-ray radiation, while the XMM-Newton detects lower-energy X-rays. By simultaneously observing the X-rays emitted by iron in the black hole’s accretion disc, the telescopes were able to determine that the X-ray distortion was coming from the black hole instead of gas clouds. This means that astronomers can now use iron signature distortions to measure black hole spin rates.

“If I could have added one instrument to XMM-Newton, it would have been a telescope like NuSTAR,” said Norbert Schartel, XMM-Newton Project Scientist at the European Space Astronomy Center. “The high-energy X-rays provided an essential missing puzzle piece for solving this problem.”

(Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Later that week, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that it was studying the event, which it predicted may happen every “several of tens to 100 years. The object was found to have been around 17 meters wide and was found to have exploded with a force of nearly 30 times that of the bomb that detonated over Hiroshima, Japan.

This week, NASA has announced that it is also analyzing the event. The agency has released a video detailing everything known about the meteor to date.

In addition to information already disclosed by the ESA, the NASA video reveals that astronomers have been able to devise the meteor’s orbit based on the trajectory of its fireball. The object is now thought to have come from the asteroid belt beyond Mars. Reports of the makeup of the meteor’s debris seem to confirm it was made of stone and a bit of iron, which is common for objects in the asteroid belt.

The European Space Agency (ESA) today announced that it is studying the event, which isn’t quite as rare as humans might hope. Astronomers predict an event of this sort may happen every “several of tens to 100 years.”

This particular meteorite was around 17 meters wide when it entered Earth’s atmosphere, traveling at around 18 kilometers per second (around 40,000 miles per hour). It exploded around 15 to 20 kilometers above the planets surface with the force of a 500 kiloton bomb. That’s around 30 times the energy released by the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima.

In a statement, Detlef Koschny, head of the Near-Earth Object activity division of the ESA’s Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program, said that the meteorite was unrelated to the passing of 2012 DA14. This was determined due to the trajectory of the meteorite and the time of its impact in relation to the passing asteroid.

“The terminal part of the explosion probably likely occurred almost directly over Chelyabinsk. This was perhaps the single greatest contributor to the blast damage,” said Koschny. “As the explosion and fireball progressed along a shallow trajectory, the cylindrical blast wave would have propagated directly to the ground and would have been intense.”

Koschny stated that the airburst was the likely cause of most of the damage seen, and that window damage is expected starting at air pressures of 10 to 20 times normal air pressure.

(Image courtesy Eumetsat/ESA)

A video of the event has quickly become one of the most-watched videos on YouTube today. It shows the object appear in the sky over the Russian city and break up in a flash of bright light.

While astronomers today were watching asteroid 2012 da14 as it made its close miss of the Earth, the object depicted in the video was too small for scientists to have predicted today’s event.

“Current information, which is not yet complete nor confirmed, points to a small asteroid,” said Detlef Koschny, head of Near-Earth Object activity at the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program. “There is no way it could have been predicted with the technical means available today. What can be said with near certainty is that this object has no connection with asteroid 2012 DA14.”

The SSA program, along with NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program (“Spaceguard”) are both searching the sky for objects that could pose a danger to Earth in the future. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx program will launch a probe in 2016 that will visit an asteroid that has a 1 in 2,400 chance of hitting the planet in the late 22nd century.

“Today’s event is a strong reminder of why we need continuous efforts to survey and identify near-Earth objects,” said Thomas Reiter, ESA’s director of Human Spaceflight and Operations. “Our SSA programme is developing a system of automated optical telescopes that can detect asteroids and other objects in solar orbits.”

(Image courtesy Eumetsat/ESA)

The study, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, has confirmed that Arctic ice volume is declining, rather than just sea ice coverage. The paper shows that the ice has declined by (36%) during the fall months and 9% during winter since 2003. The decline in sea ice during summer, though, was shown to be the greatest.

“The data reveal that thick sea ice has disappeared from a region to the north of Greenland, the Canadian Archipelago and to the northeast of Svalbard,” said Katharine Giles, co-author of the study and a researcher at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) in the U.K.

The data used in the study was collected using the NASA’s ICESat satellite and the ESA’s CryoSat satellite, which uses its high-resolution radar altimeter to fire microwave pulses at the arctic. The pulses bounce off of both the surface ice and the water below, giving researchers a measurement with which to estimate volume.

“Other satellites have already shown drops in the area covered by Arctic sea ice as the climate has warmed, but CryoSat allows scientists to estimate the volume of sea ice – a much more accurate indicator of the changes taking place in the Arctic,” said Tommaso Parrinello, CryoSat mission manager.

The device, called a laser isotope ratio-meter, was developed from bulkier laser techniques that needed samples to be collected and brought to them. The new device, developed by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in England, is small enough that it could be used in space to detect trace gasses in small samples.

“You take a laser, whose optical frequency or ‘color’ can be continuously adjusted, beam it at a gas sample, and detect the level passing through the gas,” said Damien Weidmann, Laser Spectroscopy Team Leader at RAL Space. “Each molecule, and each of its isotopic forms, has a unique fingerprint spectrum. If, on the other hand, you know what you are looking for, you can simply set the laser to the appropriate frequency.”

Through an ESA program, Weidmann and his colleagues have been able to demonstrate that the laser can quickly detect counterfeit food. Fake honey made using sugar, for example, would be detected by the laser by scanning the carbon dioxide released from burning only a few milligrams of the product. Likewise, counterfeit olive oil and chocolate could also be detected.

Though Weidmann said it was important for his project to attract interest from industry, sending the laser to Mars is his real goal.

“I wanted to develop this to help gather evidence as to whether or not there was life on Mars,” said Weidmann.

Weidmann stated that using the laser to measure carbon isotopic ratios in methane on Mars could help determine where the hydrocarbon came from.

“If it’s bacterial in origin, it would mean a form of life occurred on Mars.”

The images were taken by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) MetOp satellite, which has a ozone sensor. The satellite monitors atmospheric ozone over the Antarctic.

Since the 1980s, the ozone layer over the Antarctic developed a hole – a decrease in ozone concentration of up to 70% – that stays from September to November. The depletion is noticeable in Antarctica because of high winds that cause a vortex of cold air, causing low temperatures. These conditions make it easier for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to deplete the ozone. The arctic does not see this effect because the northern hemisphere’s landmasses prevent circumpolar winds.

Since the mid-1990s CFC concentrations have been falling as a result of international agreements. The ESA states, however, that it could take until the mid-21st century for the ozone to recover to 1960s levels.

“Unusual” weather and atmospheric conditions can also greatly affect the behavior of the ozone. ESA scientists are using data from satellites and other sensors, along with atmospheric models to predict the future of the ozone. The ESA Climate Change Initiative is generating ozone climate data records that have predicted the ozone layer hole could close “in the next decades.”

European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Reiter performed the experiments while on the ISS, as seen in the video below. Human immune cells were allowed to float freely in microgravity while others were placed in a centrifuge that simulated gravity. The cells in the centrifuge were found to be more healthy than those left to float.

Analysis showed that a transmitter called the Rel/NF-kB pathway stopped working in microgravity, preventing immune cells from working correctly.

“Normally, when our bodies sense an invasion, a cascade of reactions occur that are controlled by the information held in our genes, similar to an instruction book,” said Isabelle Walther, a researcher with the Space Biology Group in Zurich, Switzerland. “Finding which gene does what is like looking for the right key to fit a keyhole, without having found the keyhole yet.”

Researchers stated that these findings could help disease research in two ways. First, being able to deactivate genes associated with the immune system could help patients who suffer from autoimmune diseases. Second, drugs could be developed to target genes that fight specific diseases.

“We are working towards a finer control of disease,” said Millie Hughes-Fulford, a NASA astronaut and an investigator on the research. “If you imagine our immune system responding to diseases as a waterfall, up until now we have been fighting disease at the bottom of the waterfall. In the future we could target the raindrops before they have a chance to cascade into waterfalls. We live in exciting times.”