... Bad Astronomy . Misconceptions . ... Bad Astronomy : The Moon only shows one face to us because it is not rotating. Better astronomy : The Moon only shows one face because it is rotating, once every time it revolves around the Earth. ... Place the Moon model on the table about 30 centimeters (one foot) away with the X facing the Earth model. ... You'll see that to keep the X facing the Earth model, you have to rotate the Moon model as it goes around the Earth model . ... 2008 Phil Plait. ...

... Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, +44 (0)28 3752 2928 . Asteroid 2010 SO16 and the Earth follow similar orbits around . the Sun. ... out a horseshoe shape in space, taking 175 years to go from . ... Asteroid 2010 SO16 takes 175 years to make the trip from one end of the horseshoe to the other. ... Currently, three other horseshoe companions of the Earth are known to exist but, unlike 2010 SO16, these linger for a few thousand years at most before moving on to different orbits. ...

... More on 51 Peg: . The discovery of a Jupiter--mass planet in orbit around the solar--type star 51Peg has been reported by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (Geneva Observatory) on October 6th at the 9th Cambridge workshop on "cool stars, stellar systems, and the sun" held at Florence (Italy). ... Recall that the measurements of radial velocity only yield v sin i which in turn gives us M sin i. For most values of i, sin i will be greater than 0.5 and this gives a mass estimate of 0.5 Jupiter masses. ...

... Asteroid Introduction (This Page) . ... Asteroid Summary . Asteroids . Gaspra , Ida & Dactyl , Toutatis , Castalia , Vesta , Geographos, Mathilde . ... NEAR Spacecraft Homepage . Near-Earth Asteroid 3753 - Earth's Curious Companion . ... Then on October 1991 asteroid 951 Gaspra was visited by the Galileo spacecraft and became the first asteroid to have hi-resolution images taken of it. ... Both Gaspra and Ida are classified as S-type asteroids composed of metal-rich silicates. ... Gaspra . ...

... APOD: 2011 December 7 Kepler 22b: An Almost Earth Orbiting an Almost Sun . ... Recently discovered planet Kepler 22b has therefore instantly become the best place to find life outside our Solar System. ... The planet, Kepler 22b , is over twice the radius of the Earth and orbits slightly closer in, but lies in the habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface. ... Whether Kepler 22b actually contains water or life is currently unknown. ... Kepler 78b: Earth Sized Planet Discovered . ...

... Editor's choices for the most educational Astronomy Pictures of the Day about asteroids: . ... Over the past year, projects such as Spacewatch and Spaceguard have continually discovered previously unknown asteroids that indeed pass near the Earth. ... In June, 100-meter asteroid 2002 MN was discovered only after it whizzed by the Earth, crossing even within the orbit of the Moon. ... APOD: 2004 June 19 - Ida and Dactyl: Asteroid and Moon . ... Dactyl is the first moon of an asteroid ever discovered....

... Planets . ... Earth Satellites . ... Looking in the direction of the constellation Cygnus the Swan and launched by NASA in 2009 is the Kepler Space Observatory.Many previous missions searching for exoplanets mainly detected large giant planets, like large hot Jupiters (it is easier to detect larger planets).However KeplerтАЩs main objective is to search for much smaller planets located in a habitable zone which is not too close nor too far from their star; planets which may be just like our Earth. ...

... Spacecraft . ... To space by cannon? Finally, the deep space explorers --spacecraft which break away from the Earth's gravity . ... The "Luna" series of the USSR conducted 7 soft landing of unmanned probes, two of them with wheeled robotic "Lunokhods," and two of those missions returned samples to Earth. Others spacecraft have visited the major planets of the Solar system. ... The Mariner series have explored Venus and Mars--and Mariner 10 even reached Mercury, for three separate encounters! ...

... Comet Tutorial . ... On July 1, 1993 an image was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) that clearly shows at least 15 individual fragments in one image frame of the train. ... This made an accurate orbit (or orbits) difficult to determine; however, after numerous observations of the comet, astronmers determined that the comet had passed within 96,000 kilometers (60,000 miles) of the center of Jupiter or 25,000 kilometers (16,000 miles) from the cloud tops during the July 8, 1992, approach. ...

... Asteroid . ... In case you didn't hear about it, which you probably didn't: On Jan. 7, an asteroid 1,000 feet across -- nearly three times the current diameter of Marlon Brando -- barely missed the Earth, which is most likely your planet of residence. ... What if this asteroid had hit the Earth? ... As it happens, the American Astronomical Society was holding a conference in Washington AT THE VERY SAME TIME as the asteroid nearly hit the Earth. ...

The AstroGuide . ... AstroGuide | ... AstroGuide Listing . ... See many more Astronomy Listings by: Category or Alphabet . This project was established in mid-1998 to help coordinate, and provide a focal point for, the study of those comets and asteroids that can approach the Earth's orbit. ... Web Site . ... Unless otherwise specified, web site content Copyright 1994-2016 John Huggins All Rights Reserved . dbHTML," "AstroGuide," "ASTRONOMY.NET" & "VA.NET" . are trademarks of John Huggins ...

NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office . ... This paper briefly presents the history, interactions and current activities of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office. The Program Office utilizes near-Earth object (NEO) astrometric data from the international community, received from the Minor Planet Center, to refine orbits and provide predictions for coming Earth close approaches. ... Recent studies of some of the issues surrounding the deflection of an Earth threatening NEO are also described. ...

... The remote planet Pluto and its moon Charon orbit the Sun at a mean distance of almost 6,000 million kilometres, or nearly fourty times farther out than the Earth. During a recent investigation by an international group of astronomers [1], the best picture ever of Pluto and Charon [2] was secured with the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera at the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). ... The new HST image was taken when Charon was near its maximum elongation from Pluto (0.9 arcseconds). ...

Geotimes -- November 2005 -- Two more moons for "planet" Pluto http://www.geotimes.org/nov05/WebExtra110305.html Web Extra Thursday, November 3, 2005 Two more moons for Pluto When the New Horizons spacecraft finally reaches Pluto in July 2015, researchers will have more objects to study than previously thought. In addition to Pluto's confirmed moon Charon, astronomers have detected two more orbiting celestial bodies, which could help reveal how the planet and moon system formed. ...

3) Planets and Brown Dwarfs . ... By its nature, this method is most sensitive to massive planets orbiting close to their stars. ... That means that some of the more massive extrasolar planets could actually be brown dwarfs (although the statistics of the finds suggest that most of them are not). ... Another possible difference between brown dwarfs and massive planets is how they are born. ... They would base the fundamental definition on the mode of formation: a planet is built from planetesimals. ...

Asteroid 2055 YU55 passes close by Earth; how close did it get? ... As Elizabeth Flock reported: An asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier missed Earth by only 200,000 miles as it flew by Tuesday night the closest an asteroid has been to Earth in 200 years Asteroid 2005 YU55, as it has been dubbed, streaked by at about 30,000 mph, but some scientists and lucky amateur astronomers caught a glimpse in their telescopes, where they saw strange structures on the asteroid\u2019s dark-colored surface. ...

КОСМИЧЕСКИЙ КАЛЕНДАРЬ ЯНВАРЯ 2000 ГОДА . ... Jan 01 - Year 2000 . Jan ?? ... Jan 01 - Asteroid 1996 AX1 Closest Approach To Earth (0.702 AU) . ... Jan 03 - Asteroid 3745 Petaev Closest Approach To Earth (1.862 AU) . ... Jan 05 - Asteroid 1999 VO11 Near-Earth Flyby (0.218 AU) . ... Jan 08 - Comet P/1998 VS24 (LINEAR) Closest Approach To Earth (2.915 AU) . ... Jan 12 -[Image][Dec 02] Asteroid 1999 WA2 Closest Approach To Earth (1.100 AU) . ... Jan 14 - Mercury Occults 53 Sgr (6.9 Magnitude Star) . ...

T he Siding Spring Survey (SSS) is a Near-Earth Object search program that utilises the 0.5-m Uppsala Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, N.S.W., Australia. ... The mission of the Siding Spring Survey is to contribute to the inventory of near-earth objects (NEOs), or more specifically, the potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) and comets (PHOs) that may pose a threat of impact and thus harm to civilization. ... Based on the CSS Mission page . ... Siding Spring Survey Main Page . ...

... For the past years I have been working on the problem of synthesis of light curves of close binary systems, consisting of a normal star and a compact object (point object with fixed X-ray luminosity). ... Possible existence of a bright spot on the disk's lateral surface is taken into account. ... The last of then will be published in Gordon and Breach Publishers ( Cherepashchuk A.M., Katysheva N.A., Khruzina T.S., Shugarov S.Yu. ... Cherepashchuk A.M., Katysheva N.A., Khruzina T.S., Shugarov S.Yu. ...

... Observing . ... Supernova showered Earth with radioactive debris . ... Asteroid Toutatis slowly tumbles by Earth . ... The next time Toutatis will approach at least this close to Earth is November 2069, when the asteroid will safely fly by at about 7.7 lunar distances, or 1.8 million miles (3 million km). ... Only registered members of Astronomy.com are allowed to comment on this article. ... Receive news, sky-event information, observing tips, and more from Astronomy's weekly email newsletter. ...