NASA-International Space Station

The Herschel Space Observatory has exposed the chemical fingerprints of potentially life-enabling organic molecules in the Orion nebula, a nearby stellar nursery in our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel is led by the European Space Agency with important participation from NASA.

The new data, obtained with the telescope's heterodyne gadget for the far infrared -- one of Herschel's three innovative instruments demonstrates the gold mine of information that Herschel will offer on how organic molecules form in space.

The Orion nebula is known to be one of the most prolific chemical factories in space, although the full extent of its chemistry and the pathways for molecule formation are not well understood. By sifting through the pattern of spikes in the new data, called a spectrum, astronomers have recognized a few common molecules that are precursors to life-enabling molecules, including water, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, methanol, dimethyl ether, hydrogen cyanide, sulfur oxide and sulfur dioxide.

Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by a consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

The European Space Agency has unveiled images taken by the Herschel space telescope of a stellar nursery that was shrouded in dust until now. The cloud, located 1,000 light years away in the constellation Aquila, the eagle, contains about 700 clumps of gas and dust in the course of becoming stars.

ESA astronomers say about 100 of these condensations are protostars, stars in the concluding stages of forming but not yet undergoing nuclear fusion.The image shows an area of space 65 light years across. No earlier infrared space telescope has been able to penetrate the dense clouds of dust that hide the stellar nursery from view.

The Herschel telescope contains more receptive infrared instruments than any previous telescope, the ESA says.

The image was taken Oct. 24, combining data from two dissimilar instruments on Herschel. The two bright spots in the image are caused by newborn stars that make the hydrogen gas around them shine The stellar nursery image is the first one released from the ESA's Online Showcase of Herschel Images, a library of the telescope's best images, due to go live Wednesday.

The Herschel Space Observatory was launched May 15 along with the Planck space telescope. The mirror the Herschel relies on to draw and focus light is the largest ever launched into space, with a diameter of 3.5 meters, almost 1½ times as large as the mirror on the Hubble space telescope.

The James Webb infrared space telescope, a joint project of NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency planned to go into space in 2012, will have a 6.5-metre mirror.