NASA has launched a robotic mission to try to prevent one of its ageing telescopes from burning up in the atmosphere in a complicated operation expected to last several months. Northrop Grumman launched the Link spacecraft - built by United States-based Katalyst Space Technologies - from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean on Friday. Initially scheduled for Tuesday, the robot's launch was postponed due to weather, then technical issues. Blast-off happened on Friday at 0836 GMT from an atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The unprecedented $30m effort involves sending a robot to rescue the Swift space telescope that is falling towards Earth.

Image caption, Artist's impression of the Swift observatory which was built to study the cosmos A Nasa-funded spacecraft has been sent into space to catch a falling telescope. The Swift observatory detects some of the most powerful explosions in the Universe - but is at risk of crashing back to Earth in the coming months. The small space telescope will be intercepted by the LINK craft, which will attempt to grab it with three robotic arms, and try and lift it back to a safe orbit. The rescue mission, launched on Friday, has never been attempted before, and Dr Simeon Barber, a space scientist, has said it is high risk. But Nasa obviously thinks it's worth a go.

More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Nintendo released the Game Boy Camera in 1998 and discontinued it only four years later. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . Both amateur and professional astronomers have captured incredible photos of Jupiter from Earth over the years, while space probes like NASA's Juno have actually glimpsed the gas giant up close.

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Computing image plane coordinates: For a given high-resolution (HR) image with the resolution of H W and a downsampling rate s, we generate the size of the downsampled low-resolution (LR) image, referred to as Hs Ws . With the two sizes, we have specific coordinates of pixels in both LR and HR images. Transfer pixels to sky: For HR and IR pixel coordinates, we transfer them into the celestial coordinate system as: (u,v) (ra,dec), where (u,v) is a coordinate in the image plane while (ra,dec) is the longitude and latitude coordinates of the Earth. Note that, each pixel is not an ideal point and actually a rectangle on the image plane. After the mapping, it becomes a quadrilateral surface of the celestial coordinate system.

We propose STAR, a large-scale astronomical SR dataset containing 54,738 flux-consistent star field image pairs covering wide celestial regions. These pairs combine Hubble Space Telescope high-resolution observations with physically faithful low-resolution counterparts generated through a flux-preserving data generation pipeline, enabling systematic development of field-level ASR models. To further empower the ASR community, STAR provides a novel Flux Error (FE) to evaluate SR models in physical view. Leveraging this benchmark, we propose a Flux-Invariant Super Resolution (FISR) model that could accurately infer the flux-consistent highresolution images from input photometry, suppressing several SR state-of-the-art methods by 24.84% on a novel designed flux consistency metric, showing the priority of our method for astrophysics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method and the value of our dataset. Code and models are available at https://github.com/GuoCheng12/STAR

Science Space Deep Space Space Telescope Put your name aboard NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope The next generation space observatory is scheduled to launch in August. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. The NASA observatory was designed to settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics. Roman's barrel-like shape will help block out unwanted light from the sun, Earth, and moon, and the spacecraft's distant location will help keep the instruments cool. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week.

Over 11 years, citizen scientists collected billions of data signals for the SETI@home project. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. After reviewing almost 30 years of signals, University of California Berkeley researchers have identified 100 mysterious, deep-space radio blips they want to review for signs of extraterrestrial life . And they couldn't have done it without 11 years of volunteer work from millions of PC owners around the world. Even with today's advanced computers, the world's most complex data problems can't be solved by a single machine.

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'We essentially have 102 new maps of the entire sky.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. NASA aimed big for its SPHEREx's first 3D cosmic map . Only six months after starting operations, the orbital space telescope has completed its inaugural infrared scan of the entire sky. Although infrared isn't visible to the human eye, the map's 102 wavelengths remain detectable across the universe--to the right instruments. "It's incredible how much information SPHEREx has collected in just six months--information that will be especially valuable when used alongside our other missions' data to better understand our universe," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA, said in a statement .