Written by Nicholos Wethington

Just yesterday Fraser wrote about the Milky Way's demotion from a 4-arm spiral galaxy to a 2-arm. This isn't the only change we'll have to accept about our home galaxy: a Milky Way mapping project has discovered stars in the galaxy moving slower and in more elliptical orbits than predicted. This means we might have to redraw the map we have of our own neighborhood yet again.

Astronomers using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) - a collaboration of ten radio telescopes across the United States - tracked the positions of masers in a dozen star-forming regions in the Milky Way. They used parallax to determine the distance to the masers, then combined this information with how the masers shifted in the plane of the sky, giving a 3-dimensional model of their movement.

Written by Nancy Atkinson

"To see a world in a grain of sand…" – English Poet William Blake

The Phoenix science team tested out the lander's Optical Microscope by imaging grains of sand and dust particles, some as small as one-tenth the diameter of a human hair. These are the highest resolution image ever of small soil particles from another planet. "We have images showing the diversity of mineralogy on Mars at a scale that is unprecedented in planetary exploration," said Michael Hecht of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The microscope observed particles that had fallen onto an exposed surface of the lander. "It's a first quick look," Hecht said. "This experiment was partly an insurance policy for something to observe with the microscope before getting a soil sample delivered by the arm, and partly a characterization of the Optical Microscope. All the tools are working well."