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16 Oct

NASA’s Chandra Observatory back in action

Washington: NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, observing the universe in high-energy light since 1999, is back in action after suffering a glitch due to the failure of the gyroscope and going into safe mode last week.The cause of Chandra's safe mode on October 10 has now been understood and the Operations team has successfully returned the spacecraft to its normal pointing mode, according to the US space agency. "The safe mode was caused by a glitch in one of Chandra's gyroscopes resulting in a 3-second period of bad data that, in turn, led the on-board computer to calculate an incorrect value for…

18 Aug

Earth-like planet may be lurking in nearby star system

New York: Scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have predicted that an Earth-like planet may be lurking in a star system just 16 light years away. The team investigated the star system Gliese 832 for additional exoplanets residing between the two currently known alien worlds in this system. Their computations revealed that an additional Earth-like planet with a dynamically stable configuration may be residing at a distance ranging from 0.25 to 2.0 astronomical unit (AU) from the star, according to a study published in The Astrophysical Journal. "According to our calculations, this hypothetical alien world would probably have a mass between 1…