In 1998, Comet 9P/Tempel 1 was chosen as the target of the Deep Impact mission (A’Hearn, M. F., Belton, M. J. S., and Delamere, A., Space Sci. Rev., 2005) even though very little was known about its physical properties. Efforts were immediately begun to improve this situation by the Deep Impact Science Team leading to the founding of a worldwide observing campaign (Meech et al., Space Sci. Rev....

A final release (Version L) of the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) Precision Experiment Data Record (PEDR) has been submitted to the Planetary Data System (PDS). Additional gridded data record products are forthcoming. These products have evolved since their original description, owing in part to improved gravity modeling and cartographic reference frames, and in part to refinements in cali...

We present the discovery of a z = 4.13 galaxy TN J1338-1942, the most distant radio galaxy in the southern hemisphere known to date. The source was selected from a sample of Ultra Steep Spectrum (USS; α < −1.3; S ∝ ν) radio sources using the Texas and NVSS catalogs. The discovery spectrum, obtained with the ESO 3.6m telescope, shows bright extended Ly-α emission. The radio source has a very asy...

Highly sensitive imaging observations of the Galactic center () at high energies with an angular resolution of order 10 arcminutes, is a very recent development in the field of high-energy astrophysics. The Ibis/Isgri imager on the Integral observatory detected for the first time a hard X-ray source, IGR J17456–2901, located within 1 arcminute of Sagittarius A∗ (Sgr A∗) over the energy range ...

Motivated by NASA’s need for high-assurance software, NASA Ames' Amphion project has developed a generic program generation system based on deductive synthesis. Amphion has a number of advantages, such as the ability to develop a new synthesis system simply by writing a declarative domain theory. However, as a practical matter, the validation of the domain theory for such a system is problemati...

We present the discovery of the optical and radio afterglow of GRB 010921, the first gamma-ray burst afterglow to be found from a localisation by the High Energy Transient Explorer satellite. Discovery of the afterglow enabled us to determine the redshift, z = 0:45092 from the host galaxy. We expect that the low redshift of this GRB will enable the strongest limits on the detection of an underl...

As of 1 January 1998, the celestial reference system adopted by the IAU will be based on a set of extragalactic directions, replacing the Fundamental Katalog No 5 (FK5) that gave star coordinates in a reference system (referred to as equator and equinox J2000) based primarily on the dynamics of the solar system. This change is deeper than a mere replacement of a reference system by a better one...

The advent of sensitive sub-mm array cameras now allows a proper census of dustenshrouded massive star-formation in very distant galaxies, previously hidden activity to which even the deepest optical images are insensitive. We present the deepest sub-mm survey, taken with the SCUBA camera on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and centred on the Hubble Deep Field (HDF). The high source den...

An efficient Kalman filter based algorithm has been proposed for the spacecraft attitude estimation problem using a novel split-field-of-view star camera and three-axis rate gyros. The conventional spacecraft attitude algorithm has been modified for on-orbit estimation of interlock angles between the two fields of view of star camera, gyro axis, and the spacecraft body frame. Real time estimati...

This paper deals with the unsupervised segmentation of astronomical multiband images. Most of these images have the particularity to be quantized on float numbers with large luminance range, on different wavelengths. These characteristics require to manipulate large amount of extremely accurate data on each spectral band, which is very different to the case of 8-bits-integer coded pixels. We pr...