Titan, the largest satellite of Saturn, with a dense atmosphere very rich in organics, and many couplings in the various parts of its "geofluid", is a reference for studying prebiotic chemistry on a planetary scale. New data have been obtained from experiments simulating this organic chemistry (gas and aerosol phases), within the right ranges of temperature and a careful avoiding of any chemical contamination. They show a very good agreement with the observational data, demonstrating for the first time the formation of all the organic species already detected in Titan atmosphere including, at last, C4N2, together with many other species not yet detected in Titan. This strongly suggests the presence of more complex organics in Titan's atmosphere and surface, including high molecular weight polyynes and cyanopolyynes. The NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission has been successfully launched in October 1997. The Cassini spacecraft will reach the Saturn system in 2004 and become an orbiter around Saturn, while the Huygens probe will penetrate into Titan's atmosphere. In situ measurements, in particular from Huygens GC-MS and ACP instruments, will provide a detailed analysis of the organics present in the air, aerosols, and surface. This very ambitious mission should yield much information of crucial importance for our knowledge of the complexity of Titan's chemistry, and, more generally for the field of exobiology. 相似文献
The subject of space education is attracting increasing attention, but there are diverging views as to how it should be approached, as can be seen from the following two reports of Education Remote Sensing '92, a conference held in Cardiff, Wales, 28–30 June 1992. 相似文献
The X-ray properties of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) support recent theories which unify the Seyfert 1 nuclei with the Seyfert 2's and radio-quiet quasars. In these objects the underlying spectrum is strongly distorted by the effects of reflection from the accretion flow and by absorption in partially ionised material. These obscure any intrinsic changes in the spectrum, making it difficult (though not impossible) to constrain the nature of the emission process. Conversely, there is no evidence for either of these spectral distortions in the radio-loud AGN, supporting the hypothesis that the X-rays are dominated by beamed emission from the relativistic jet. 相似文献
EUVITA is a set of 8 extreme UV normal incidence imaging telescopes, each of them sensitive in a narrow band (λ/Δλ = 15 to 80), centered at wavelengths between 50 and 175 Å. Each telescope has an effective area of a few cm2; a field of view of 1.2° and a spatial resolution of 10 arcsec.
EUVITA will be flown on the Russian mission SPECTRUM X-G. This satellite will be launched in a highly eccentric orbit with a period of 4 days, allowing long, uninterrupted observations (e.g. 105 seconds). EUVITA's narrow spectral bands allow the measurement of source parameters such as temperature or power law index as well as interstellar absorption, and will resolve groups of strong lines emitted by optically thin hot plasmas. 相似文献
Rotation at 4, 10, 50 and 100 rpm on a horizontal clinostat and in microgravity exerts limited effects on the morphogenesis of lettuce and cress root statocytes and statoliths if compared with the vertical control or 1 g spaceflight reference centrifuge. However, the average distance of statoliths from the distal wall increases. The pattern of plastid location of microgravity-grown and that of clino-rotated samples has been determined at 10, 50, and 100 rpm. Experiments on the centrifuge-clinostat and spaceflight centrifuge (acceleration forces of 0.005 to 1 g) revealed that the average statolith location depends on the amplitude of acropetally or basipetally directed mass acceleration. Decreasing the acropetally directed force from 1 g to 0.4 g dislocates statoliths towards the cell center possibly mediated by the elastic forces of the cytoskeleton. In statocytes formed on the clinostat or in microgravity, the majority of statoliths are located at the center of the cell. To force the statoliths from the center of the statocyte towards one of its poles, a threshold mass acceleration of 0.01 g is required. Statocytes with centrally-located statoliths are considerably more effective in transducing a gravistimulus than those with distally-located plastids. The latent time of the graviresponse is shorter and the response itself is enhanced in roots grown on the clinostat compared to vertically grown samples. The early phases of graviperception are independent of root growth conditions since presentation time and g-threshold are similar for roots grown stationary and those on a clinostat. We propose a sequence of events in gravitropic stimulation that considers not only the lateral displacement of statoliths, as predicted by the starch-statolith hypothesis, but also its longitudinal motion, together with differential gravisensitivity of mechanotransducing structures along the lower-most longitudinal cell wall. 相似文献
The paper gives a summary of the situation mid-1993 of theory and observations regarding massive stars. I describe: stellar mass loss and its implications, pre-main-sequence evolution, the main sequence, problems of atmospheric instability, Luminous Blue Supergiants, Yellow Hypergiants, Wolf-Rayet stars and supernovae. 相似文献
We report the first detection of two soft gamma ray transients GX 354-0 and Nova Persei (GRO J0422+32) by the coded-mask telescope SIGMA. Only preliminary results are presented with regard to Nova Persei while special emphasis is given to the data on GX 354-0 which has been monitored during the 1992 February–April survey of the Galactic Center. GX 354-0 underwent two flares of about two week duration and its average spectrum is well described by a thermal Bremsstrahlung model or a broken power law whereas the Nova Persei spectrum seems to be similar to the one observed for GRS 1124-684 in Musca. 相似文献
The Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT) was flown aboard the space shuttle Columbia as part of the Astro-1 mission during December 1990. During the nine-day flight, HUT carried out 3 Å resolution spectrophotometry of a wide variety of astronomical objects, including a number of stellar targets, in the 912–1860 Å range of the far ultraviolet. A few nearby stars were observed in the 415–912 Å range of the extreme ultraviolet as well. For nearly all of these targets, the spectra obtained by HUT are the first ever obtained in the spectroscopically rich region between Lyman (1216 Å) and the Lyman limit (912 Å). Here, we present highlights of the results obtained by HUT in a variety of areas of stellar astronomy. 相似文献
Hard X-ray observations of Cyg X-3 in the energy range 20–100 keV were made with a Balloon-borne telescope using two large area proportional counters. The source was seen with a total significance of 20.
A 121 s periodicity was seen during Fourier analysis of the data. The phenomenon can be interpreted as due to transient pulsation since no other peak was seen in our data. Quasi-periodic oscillation in the range 0.06–20 mHz have been observed from Cyg X-3 at lower energies. Interestingly, most of the reported periods are multiple of the present measurements. The observed pulsation at high energies indicate the occasional unstable behaviour of the inner parts of the accretion disk connected with the basic rotation period of the compact object.
The 4.8h modulation, characteristic of the orbital period of the binary system was seen in the data, with a broad maximum between the phase 0.3 to 0.7. 相似文献