wire - news in brief

A year ago, the University of Zurich conducted its first parabolic flight for test purposes from Swiss soil. Now a second aircraft is ready for lift-off to research zero gravity: Tomorrow (Saturday), an Airbus A310 ZERO-G is set to take off from the air force base in Dübendorf equipped with scientific experiments from the Universities of Zurich, Basel, Lucerne and ETH Zurich.

Rosetta's mission is over: After the last signal at 13:20, the spacecraft was crash-landed on comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, with the ROSINA instrument from Bern taking measurements right until the very end.

For twelve years, the space probe Rosetta served mankind. The European Space Agency (ESA) mission is now drawing to a close as the probe reaches its final resting place on the target comet Tschuri on September 30, 2016.

Bern, 27. Rosetta is set to complete its mission in a controlled descent to the surface of its comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 30 September 2016.

23. The little Swiss satellite was launched on 23 September 2009 and continues to send back regular reports.

This simulation shows how two galaxies merge over a period of 15 millionen years. The red and the blue dots illustrate the two black holes (image: Astrophysical Journal).

With the help of satellite data, ETH scientists have shown that low-level cloud cover in the tropics thins out as the earth warms. Since this cloud cover has a cooling effect on the climate, the two-degree warming target may therefore be reached earlier than many models have predicted. It is indisputable that greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere heat up our planet.

The much-travelled European research satellite Eureca was taken from the aerospace exhibition in the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne and loaded onto a truck before setting off on yet another adventure.

POLAR detector developed at the PSI flies into orbit with a Chinese space mission Researchers working with Wojciech Hajdas at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have developed a detector called POLAR. This instrument is expected to search out and investigate so-called gamma ray bursts coming from the depths of the universe.

01. A Chihuahua has traveled across EPFL's miniature black hole and entered the fourth dimension. He's the first living organism to have accomplished this feat.

Media releases, information for representatives of the media Media Relations (E) Children in Switzerland and all over Europe made thousands of imaginative drawings of stars, planets, rockets, satellites, and aliens.

25. Time and space are celebrating their 100th wedding anniversary. To mark the centenary of relativity theory, Anais Rassat and her cross-Channel accomplices have put Einstein front and center in an entertaining animated film.

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko continues to reveal more of its secrets: Researchers in Bern have detected considerable variations in the gas escaping from the comet. This could amount to seasonal changes on the tiny celestial body. Meanwhile, the camera OSIRIS on board the Rosetta comet probe is revealing new details of the surface of «Chury».

Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko poses new riddles: Surface material measurements performed by the «Philae» landing module indicate that the near surface material might have changed since its formation. Up to now, many researchers had assumed that it has remained in virtually the same state since its formation about 4.5 billion years ago.

Rosetta's target «Chury» and other comets observed by space missions show common evidence of layered structures and bi-lobed shapes. With 3D computer simulations Martin Jutzi, astrophysicist at the University of Bern, was able to reconstruct the formation of these features as a result of gentle collisions and mergers.

Great honour for Nicolas Thomas from the University of Berne: The scientist was selected as part of the imaging team for NASA's Europa Clipper mission.

At Scientifica 2015, everything revolves around the theme of light. This weekend's event will feature 300 researchers from ETH and the University of Zurich presenting their work and explaining how they use light to observe and understand the world.

Event displays of a candidate B0 s particle decaying into two muons in the CMS detector (left - Image: CMS/CERN) and in the LHCb detector (right - Image: CMS/CERN)                           Geneva, 13 May 2015. In an article , the CMS and LHCb collaborations describe the first observation of the very rare decay of the B0 s particle into two muon particles.

Geneva, 22 April 2015. A group of scientists led by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia will transport the world's largest liquid-argon neutrino detector across the Atlantic Ocean from CERN to its new home at the U.S. Department of Energy' 2 s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory 3 . The 760-ton, 20-metre-long detector took data for the ICARUS experiment at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics 4 ' (INFN) Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy from 2010 to 2014, using a beam of neutrinos sent through the earth from CERN.

Geneva, 15 April 2015. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS ) collaboration will present today the latest results in its quest to understand the origin of cosmic rays and dark matter. These intriguing results will be shared and discussed during the "AMS days" starting today at CERN 2 , with many of the world's leading theoretical physicists and principal investigators of some of the major experiments exploring the field of cosmic-ray physics.

This year a great deal of research done at EPFL made the headlines in newspapers. Here are a few that marked the months of September to December.

EPFL scientists have picked up an atypical photon emission in X-rays coming from space, and say it could be evidence for the existence of a particle of dark matter. If confirmed, it could open up new perspectives in cosmology. Could there finally be tangible evidence for the existence of dark matter in the Universe? After sifting through reams of X-ray data, scientists in EPFL's Laboratory of Particle Physics and Cosmology (LPPC) and Leiden University believe they could have identified the signal of a particle of dark matter.

Geneva, 7 July 2014. Speaking at press conference held during the 37 th International Conference on High Energy Physics, ICHEP, in Valencia, Spain this morning CERN Director General Rolf Heuer gave a resume of results from CERN that are being presented. The conference, which began last Thursday with three days of parallel sessions, now moves on to plenary sessions until Wednesday, summing up the current state of the art in the field.

Media Releases Matter and Material Processes in stars recreated with isotopes from PSI To understand why chemical elements exist in certain amounts on Earth, processes that take place in exploding stars – supernovae – need to be studied. After all, much of the matter that makes up the earth was formed in a supernova billions of years ago and hurled into space by the explosion.

Geneva, 19 July 2013. New results to be presented at the EPS-HEP conference in Stockholm, Sweden, this afternoon have put the Standard Model of particle physics to one of its most stringent tests to date. The CMS and LHCb experiments at CERN's  Large Hadron Collider will present measurements of one of the rarest measureable processes in physics: the decay of a B s (pronounced B-sub-s) particle into two muons.

Geneva 3 April 2013. The international team running the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS ) today announced the first results in its search for dark matter. The results, presented by AMS spokesperson Professor Samuel Ting in a seminar at CERN 2 , are to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Bern, 07. The European Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs) are an important element of the supply logistics for the International Space Station (ISS).

Geneva, 13 August 2012. Experiments using heavy ions at CERN 's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are advancing understanding of the primordial universe. The ALICE, ATLAS and CMS collaborations have made new measurements of the kind of matter that probably existed in the first instants of the universe. They will present their latest results at the Quark Matter 2012 conference, which starts today in Washington DC.

Geneva, 25 July 2012. CERN today marked the first year in space for the  Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) with a visit from the crew of the shuttle mission, STS-134 , that successfully delivered AMS to the  the  International Space Station (ISS) just over a year ago.

The first prototype of a new, ultra-compact motor that will allow small satellites to journey beyond Earth's orbit is just making its way out of the EPFL laboratories where it was built.

The proliferation of debris orbiting the Earth - primarily jettisoned rocket and satellite components - is an increasingly pressing problem for spacecraft, and it can generate huge costs.

A new tool to calculate the orientation of a satellite with respect to the Earth, developed by EPFL students, will be on board a European Space Agency rocket scheduled to launch in March 2012.

LHC Experiments Present New Results at Quark Matter 2011 Conference Geneva, 23 May 2011. The three LHC experiments that study lead ion collisions all presented their latest results today at the annual Quark Matter conference, held this year in Annecy, France. The results are based on analysis of data collected during the last two weeks of the 2010 LHC run, when the LHC switched from protons to lead-ions.

Update 16 May 2011: Shuttle Endeavour launched successfully at 14:56 CEST Update 10 May 2011: Shuttle launch delayed - launch now planned 16 May 2011.

AMS experiment takes off for Kennedy Space Center Geneva, 18 August 2010 . The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), an experiment that will search for antimatter and dark matter in space, leaves CERN 1 next Tuesday on the next leg of its journey to the International Space Station. The AMS detector 2 is being transported from CERN to Geneva International Airport in preparation for its planned departure from Switzerland on 26 August, when it will be flown to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on board a US Air Force Galaxy transport aircraft.

Researchers announced the first direct observation of a tau particle in a muon neutrino beam sent through the Earth from CERN, 730km away. This is a significant result, providing the final missing piece of a puzzle that has been challenging science since the 1960s, and giving tantalizing hints of new physics to come.

Geneva, 12 February 2010. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) left CERN 1 this morning on the first leg of its journey to the International Space Station (ISS). A special convoy carrying the experiment is due to arrive at the European Space Agency's research and technology centre, ESTEC, at Noordwijk in the Netherlands in six days time.

Zurich - University of Zurich Die Universität Zürich und die Schweizer Luftwaffe haben ein weltweit einzigartiges Forschungsvorhaben in der Weltraummedizin gestartet.

Zurich - University of Zurich Das Geographische Institut der Universität Zürich stellt nach dem Erdbeben in Haiti der Direktion für Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit Satellitenkarten zur Verfügung.

Zurich - University of Zurich Seit bald zwanzig Jahren versuchen Wissenschaftler den Widerspruch im Modell der kalten Dunklen Materie – die so genannte «kalte-Dunkle-Materie-Katastrophe» – aufzulösen.