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| A glow in the Martian night throws light on atmospheric circulation |
| A faint, infrared glow above the winter poles of Mars is giving new insights into seasonal changes in the planet's atmospheric circulation. The tell-tale night emission was first detected in 2004 in observations made by the OMEGA imaging spectrometer on ESA's Mars Express orbiter. |
| Date: 23 Mar 2012 |
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| Cassini-Huygens Participating Scientists Research Announcement 2012 |
| The scientific community is invited to respond to the current Research Announcement to submit proposals for Participating Scientists to the Cassini-Huygens mission. This Research Announcement is published jointly by ESA, NASA and ASI. The deadline for submission of proposals is 4 May 2012. |
| Date: 21 Mar 2012 |
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| Glittering jewels of Messier 9 [heic1205] |
| The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced the most detailed image so far of Messier 9, a globular star cluster located close to the centre of the galaxy. This ball of stars is too faint to see with the naked eye, yet Hubble can see over 250 000 individual stars shining in it. |
| Date: 16 Mar 2012 |
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| INTEGRAL Announcement of Opportunity (AO-10) |
| Proposals are solicited for observations with INTEGRAL in response to the Tenth Announcement of Opportunity, AO-10, issued 12 March 2012. This AO covers the period January 2013 to December 2013 and is open to all proposers. |
| Date: 14 Mar 2012 |
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| Herschel's new view on giant planet formation |
| Astronomers have used ESA's Herschel Space Observatory to observe 2MASS1207, a peculiar brown dwarf with its own circumstellar disc and a planetary companion five times more massive than Jupiter. These new data provide the first image of this system taken at sub-millimetre wavelengths and show that the disc's mass amounts to a few times the mass of Jupiter. The presence of such a massive disc around this ten-million-year old brown dwarf suggests that its planetary companion formed directly from the disc's fragmentation. This reopens the debate on how giant planets form around stellar and sub-stellar objects.
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| Date: 13 Mar 2012 |
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| Call for a Small mission opportunity in ESA's Science Programme for a launch in 2017 |
| Through the present Call the Director of Science and Robotic Exploration solicits from the broad scientific community in ESA's Member States proposals for the competitive selection of mission concepts to be candidate for the implementation of one small-size (S-class) mission for launch in 2017. The deadline for submission of proposals is 15 June 2012, 12:00 (noon) Central European Time. |
| Date: 09 Mar 2012 |
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| Earth's protective bubble hasn't burst |
| For the first time, the loss of atmospheric ions from Earth and Mars has been observed during the same solar wind stream. In a new study, data from ESA's Cluster and Mars Express spacecraft, which orbit the Earth and Mars respectively, have been used to compare the outflow of oxygen ions when the planets were aligned. The study's findings reaffirm the importance of the Earth's magnetic field in protecting our atmosphere from the solar wind, which had been questioned in recent years. |
| Date: 07 Mar 2012 |
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