Press Releases

26 September 2002: The violent beauty of solar storms and their potentially serious effects on Earth’s environment and its economy are the central themes of the Space Weather Center, a major traveling exhibit that will make its debut at the Kitt Peak Visitor Center with a ribbon-cutting reception on Tuesday, October 8, at 5:30 p.m.

6 September 2002: Direct measurements of the surface properties and interior structures of asteroids and comets should be fundamental elements of future spacecraft missions to these primitive solar system bodies, according to participants in a scientific workshop held in Arlington, VA, from September 3-6.

21 August 2002: Students from Yale University used the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory to capture a series of still images of asteroid 2002 NY40 on August 15-16, two nights before its close flyby of Earth.

13 August 2002: Thanks to a unique combination of international cooperation and the latest Internet technology, Gemini Observatory is now well on its way to becoming the world's first global "cyber observatory".

20 June 2002: What began as an essay contest in British Columbia, Canada to encourage an interest in astronomy for elementary school students has resulted in spectacular images and scientific data that may warrant possible follow-up observations.

10 June 2002: Due to the extremely high fire danger and the possibility of dry lightning strikes, Kitt Peak National Observatory is closing public access to its grounds and the Kitt Peak Visitor Center at 2 p.m. daily instead of the normal 4 p.m. The time change will have an impact on the last guided tour of the day, which will start 30 minutes earlier than normal. The public picnic grounds have already been closed to visitors until further notice.

4 June 2002: Optical technicians dressed in clean suits and protective gear incorporate a little old-fashioned "horse sense" into their procedures as they use common horse soap to clean the 8-meter (26-foot) mirror of Gemini North Telescope high atop the nearly 14,000-foot (approximately 4,000 meters) peak of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawai'i. The periodic cleaning is a highly complicated process involving more than 500 steps and a crew of more than 20 engineers, technicians and support personnel. The procedure includes dismounting the 24-ton mirror from the telescope structure, lowering it five stories to the basement, mounting it on a washing frame and then washing the aluminum-coated, 20cm (8-inch) thick glass mirror to remove accumulated contaminants on the mirror surface.

3 June 2002: Aided by the distorted shape of the stars in normally faint binary systems called Soft X-ray Transients, an astronomer at the University of California-San Diego has determined that two nearby black holes each have a mass no larger than a handful of stars like our Sun.

3 June 2002: New observations of the richly populated star cluster NGC 2420 taken by the refurbished WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory suggest that the cluster contains a multitude of clues about the history and evolution of the Milky Way.

21 May 2002: Astronomers using adaptive optics technology on the Gemini North Telescope have observed a brown dwarf orbiting a low-mass star at a distance comparable to just three times the distance between the Earth and Sun. This is the closest separation distance ever found for this type of binary system using direct imaging.

21 March 2002: Astronomers observing with the Gemini North Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea have a powerful new tool to probe mysterious cosmic caldrons like those at the cores of galaxies and stellar nurseries.

25 February 2002: A Canadian-led research team using the Gemini Observatory has released tantalizing evidence that tiny dust particles ejected by hot, massive stars, may survive long enough to reach the interstellar medium. This kind of process might have provided some of the materials necessary for the early formation of planetary systems in the young Universe.

18 January 2002: From high atop remote mountains in Chile and Hawaii, the Gemini Observatory gives astronomers access to the entire universe with twin state-of-the-art 8-meter telescopes. Today, Gemini South, the second of the Gemini telescopes to look skyward, was dedicated on its perch on Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes.

10 January 2002: A new color image of the nearby irregular galaxy NGC 6822 shows a myriad of hot blue massive stars and several famous nebulae in impressive detail.

7 January 2002: Astronomers using adaptive optics on the Gemini North and Keck telescopes have taken an image of a brown dwarf orbiting a nearby star similar to the Sun. The faint companion is separated from its parent star by less than the distance between the Sun and the planet Uranus and is the smallest separation brown dwarf companion seen with direct imaging.

7 January 2002: Astronomers using the recently commissioned Gemini North telescope in Hawaii have discovered a protoplanetary disk orbiting one of the stars in a newborn quadruple star system. The dusty disk, about three times the size of Pluto's orbit around the Sun, appears nearly edge-on when viewed from Earth.

30 December 2001:

13 December 2001: Astronomer Robert A. Schommer, one of the leading members of the scientific staff at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile and the director of the U.S. Gemini Program, died in Chile on December 12.

3 December 2001: On January 18, 2002, the Gemini Observatory will celebrate a significant milestone with the dedication of the Gemini South telescope facility at the summit of Cerro Pachón, Chile. National and international media invitations are still available and journalists can reserve space upon request.

29 October 2001: In the deepest ground-based mid-infrared image ever, the Gemini North Telescope reveals that the mysterious environment around one of the most massive black holes in the Universe is missing a key feature predicted by astronomical theory.