Just hours after Cassini-Hugyens rocketed into orbit around Saturn at 7:36 PDT (10:36 EDT) June 30, the spacecraft sent back 61 images of the giant planet's rings that researchers acclaimed as astonishing and mind-boggling.
When the Cassini-Hugyens spacecraft arrives at Saturn at 7:36 PDT (10:36 EDT) tonight (June 30), among the most anxious participants at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here will be Cornell University astronomer Joseph Burns.
Cornell researchers are playing an important role in yet another planetary space mission, this time to Saturn, the second largest planet in the solar system. On June 30 at approximately 10:30 p.m. EDT, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft will go into orbit around Saturn for an extensive tour.
A laser-based microscopy technique may have settled a long-standing debate among neuroscientists about how brain cells process energy -- while explaining what's really happening in PET (positron emission tomography) imaging and offering a better way to observe the damage that strokes and neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's, wreak on brain cells.
Saturn's mysterious moon, Phoebe, which has puzzled astronomers for more than a century because of its dark surface and retrograde orbit, has great geological variety, and probably has large areas of exposed water ice, Cornell senior astronomy researcher Peter Thomas told a press conference at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Thomas "Tommy" Gold, a brilliant and controversial figure in 20th century science and professor emeritus of astronomy at Cornell, died June 22 at Cayuga Medical Center, Ithaca, N.Y., after a long battle with heart disease. He was 84 years of age.
Hania Kronfol of Toronto, Ontario, a senior government major in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell, has been named a junior fellow by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C.
The symposium, "Women Working on Mars," was part of JPL's Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, an annual outreach event that encourages young women to consider a career in engineering or science.
A research team at Cornell has succeeded in converting nitrogen into ammonia using a long-predicted process that has challenged scientists for decades.
