November 25 News Items

Spacewalk Generates Power, Reveals Additional Station Damage (Source: Florida Today)
Spacewalking astronauts cleared the way Saturday for the launch next month of shuttle Atlantis and the European Columbus laboratory. But they also found what could spell trouble for the planned delivery next April of the Japanese Kibo science research facility. Inspecting a fouled-up solar wing rotary joint, they found more metal shavings to gum up its gears. "The engineers are going to go off and talk about this in great detail, but basically, the damage is significant and is widespread," said NASA's lead flight director. The station is generating enough electricity to support the arrival of Atlantis with Columbus, but the faulty rotary joint almost certainly will have to be fixed to produce enough power to feed the Kibo facility, too. Three or four more dedicated spacewalks likely will be required.

UK's XEUS Telescope to Replace Hubble (Source: Telergraph)
British scientists are building the biggest telescope to be launched into space - aiming to probe some of the most distant and mysterious corners of the universe. The X-ray Evolving Universe Spectroscopy, or XEUS, telescope is one of the next generation of space-based observatories that will replace the famous NASA Hubble Space Telescope, which has orbited Earth since 1990. The ambitious new telescope project has been short-listed by the European Space Agency for launch in the next 10 years. Unlike Hubble, which is encased in a single protective tube, XEUS will consist of two mini-bus sized spacecraft flying in formation 114ft apart from each other as they orbit the Sun.

Has First Evidence of Another Universe Been Seen? (Source: ITWire)
Astronomers announced in August 2007 the discovery of a large hole at the edge of our universe. Since then, theoretical physicist and cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton and colleagues have claimed it is an “unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own.” The hole is estimated to be almost one billion light-years across, where one light-year is about 9.5 trillion kilometers (5.9 trillion miles) and is located beyond the constellation Eridanus. The Mersini-Houghton team states that the hole is another universe at the edge of our own universe. Such an explanation, if true, would be the first experimental evidence of such an exo-universe, or a universe outside of our own universe.