sorry for don’ post any thing .i was couldn’t see or go to” write new post” .

happy new year (in Iran) ! read this ,i like sun too much .

Ring of Fire

This new image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) shows in great detail a solar prominence taken from a March 30, 2010 eruption. The twisting motion of the material is the most noticeable feature.

Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, SDO is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun’s magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth’s atmospheric chemistry and climate. Since launch, engineers have been conducting testing and verification of the spacecraft’s components. Now fully operational, SDO will provide images with clarity 10 times better than high-definition television and will return more comprehensive science data faster than any other solar observing spacecraft.

Image above: Anchored to the International Space Station’s robot arm, STS-123 Mission Specialist Richard Linnehan participates in a spacewalk outside the orbital outpost. Photo credit: NASA

This composite image uses data from three of NASA’s Great Observatories. The Chandra X-ray image is shown in blue, the Hubble Space Telescope optical images are in yellow and red, and the Spitzer Space Telescope’s infrared image is in purple. The X-ray image is smaller than the others because extremely energetic electrons emitting X-rays radiate away their energy more quickly than the lower-energy electrons emitting optical and infrared light. Along with many other telescopes, Chandra has repeatedly observed the Crab Nebula over the course of the mission’s lifetime. The Crab Nebula is one of the most studied objects in the sky, truly making it a cosmic icon.

Two key instruments from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have a new home in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington after being returned to Earth aboard space shuttle Atlantis last May.

Astronauts brought back the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, or WFPC-2, and the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement, or COSTAR, after more than 15 years in space. The camera returned the iconic images that now adorn posters, album covers, the Internet, classrooms and science text books worldwide.

“This was the camera that saved Hubble,” said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “I have looked forward for a long time to stand in front of this very instrument while on display to the public.”

After Hubble’s launch and deployment aboard the shuttle in 1990, scientists realized the telescope’s primary mirror had a flaw, known as a spherical aberration. The outer edge of the mirror was ground too flat by a depth of 2.2 microns, roughly equal to one-fiftieth the thickness of a human hair. This tiny flaw resulted in fuzzy images because some of the light from the objects being studied was scattered.

Hubble’s first servicing mission provided the telescope with hardware that basically acted as eye glasses. Launched in December 1993 aboard space shuttle Endeavour, the mission added the WFPC-2, about the size of a baby grand piano, and COSTAR, about the size of a telephone booth. The WFPC-2 had the optical fix built in, while the COSTAR provided the optical correction for other Hubble instruments.

The WFPC-2 made more than 135,000 observations of celestial objects from 1993 to 2009. The camera was the longest serving and most prolific instrument aboard Hubble.

“For years the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 has been taking pictures of the universe,” said John Trauger of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Today, we are taking pictures of the WFPC-2 and I guess if there was ever a camera that deserves to have its picture taken, this is it.”

The Hubble instruments will be on display in the National Air and Space Museum’s Space Hall through mid-December. They then will travel to Southern California to go on temporary display at several venues. In March 2010, the instruments will return to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, where they will take up permanent residency.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed and built the WFPC-2. The COSTAR instrument was built by Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colo. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. The project is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc., in Washington.

For more information about the Hubble Space Telescope, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

Massive, bright clouds of tiny ice particles hover above the darkened rings of Saturn in an image captured by the Cassini spacecraft on Sept. 22, 2009, around the time of Saturn’s equinox. During this period, sunlight hits the rings edge-on and shines directly over the equator. The levitating icy particle clouds, which are known as “spokes” and are as wide as 10,000 kilometers (6,000 miles), appear particularly dramatic because of the unique lighting geometry of the equinox period. The particles that make up spokes levitate above the ring plane when they acquire an electrostatic charge, the way static electricity on Earth can raise the hair on your arms. The spoke particles appear to acquire more charge during dim conditions and, during equinox, the bulk of the rings are in shadow. That angle of light also brightens features that stick out of the ring plane. Saturn’s exact equinox was Aug. 11, 2009, but there were extreme lighting conditions a few weeks before and after that date. Cassini’s wide-angle camera captured this image six weeks later, when the spacecraft was about 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) away from Saturn. The spokes appear in Saturn’s B ring. Scientists are not yet sure how high these spokes hover above the ring plane. The bright dot on the left side of the image is Saturn’s moon Janus. Spokes in Saturn’s rings were first discovered in the late 1980s by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft. The features disappeared from view between 1998 and 2005, likely because of the angle of sunlight on the rings. To learn more about spokes, click here. A movie of spokes dancing around the rings in 2008 is available here.

Credit for Hubble image: NASA, ESA, R. O’Connell (University of Virginia), B. Whitmore (Space Telescope Science Institute), M. Dopita (Australian National University), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee

The spectacular new camera installed on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope during Servicing Mission 4 in May has delivered the most detailed view of star birth in the graceful, curving arms of the nearby spiral galaxy M83. Nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel, M83 is undergoing more rapid star formation than our own Milky Way galaxy, especially in its nucleus. The sharp “eye” of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) has captured hundreds of young star clusters, ancient swarms of globular star clusters, and hundreds of thousands of individual stars, mostly blue supergiants and red supergiants. The image at right is Hubble’s close-up view of the myriad stars near the galaxy’s core, the bright whitish region at far right. An image of the entire galaxy, taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Wide Field Imager on the ESO/MPG 2.2-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile, is shown at left. The white box outlines Hubble’s view. WFC3′s broad wavelength range, from ultraviolet to near-infrared, reveals stars at different stages of evolution, allowing astronomers to dissect the galaxy’s star-formation history. The image reveals in unprecedented detail the current rapid rate of star birth in this famous “grand design” spiral galaxy. The newest generations of stars are forming largely in clusters on the edges of the dark dust lanes, the backbone of the spiral arms. These fledgling stars, only a few million years old, are bursting out of their dusty cocoons and producing bubbles of reddish glowing hydrogen gas. The excavated regions give a colorful “Swiss cheese” appearance to the spiral arm. Gradually, the young stars’ fierce winds (streams of charged particles) blow away the gas, revealing bright blue star clusters. These stars are about 1 million to 10 million years old. The older populations of stars are not as blue. A bar of stars, gas, and dust slicing across the core of the galaxy may be instigating most of the star birth in the galaxy’s core. The bar funnels material to the galaxy’s center, where the most active star formation is taking place. The brightest star clusters reside along an arc near the core. The remains of about 60 supernova blasts, the deaths of massive stars, can be seen in the image, five times more than known previously in this region. WFC3 identified the remnants of exploded stars. By studying these remnants, astronomers can better understand the nature of the progenitor stars, which are responsible for the creation and dispersal of most of the galaxy’s heavy elements. M83, located in the Southern Hemisphere, is often compared to M51, dubbed the Whirlpool galaxy, in the Northern Hemisphere. Located 15 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra, M83 is two times closer to Earth than M51. Credit for ground-based image: European Southern Observatory The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. Goddard manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute conducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. in Washington, and is an International Year of Astronomy 2009 program partner. Images and more information about M83 are available at: › HubbleSite › Space Telescope Science Institute › NASA Hubble page