TECHNEWS

Washington, Oct 25 (IANS) NASA's Parker Solar Probe, enroute to the Sun to unravel its mysteries, has captured a view of Earth, from about 27 million miles away, the US space agency said.The image was captured by the WISPR (Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe) instrument, the only imaging instrument on board the Parker Solar Probe.On September 25, the Parker Solar Probe captured a view of Earth as it sped toward the first Venus gravity assist of the mission, NASA said in a statement on Wednesday. Earth is the bright, round object visible in the right side of the image, it added. The view from Parker Solar Probe's WISPR shows Earth, the bright sphere near the middle of the right-hand panel. The elongated mark toward the bottom of the panel is a lens reflection from the WISPR instrument.It also shows what appears to be a bulge on our planet's right side -- the Moon, NASA said.The hemispherical shaped feature in the middle of the right-hand image is a lens flare, a...

NASA has used certain characters from modern myths such as the "Hulk" and "Godzilla" to name its new set of 21 gamma-ray constellations constructed in celebration of its Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope's 10th year of operations. Fermi has mapped about 3,000 gamma-ray sources -- 10 times the number known before its launch and comparable to the number of bright stars in the traditional constellations. "For the first time ever, the number of known gamma-ray sources was comparable to the number of bright stars, so we thought a new set of constellations was a great way to illustrate the point," NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center's Elizabeth Ferrara who led the constellation project said in a statement. "Developing these unofficial constellations was a fun way to highlight a decade of Fermi's accomplishments," Julie McEnery, the Fermi project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said. Comic book fans who ...