In Brief:

Jupiter unleashes mysterious bright flash

(CNN) -- An extraordinarily bright flare erupted on Jupiter, puzzling scientists who detected the burst with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Looking at Jupiter's aurora, the most powerful in the solar system, researchers observed an intense aurora emission that increased 30 times in brightness within seconds before plummeting back to normal levels.

"The flare is far brighter than anything we've seen before at Jupiter," said Randy Gladstone, member of a scientific team that reported the event in the April 12 issue of the journal Nature. "The amount of energy released is comparable to an atomic bomb blast."

Terrestrial auroras take place when the solar wind interacts with the magnetic field around the Earth. Those on Jupiter are fed largely by energy extracted from the planet's rotation.

The research team, including scientists from the University of Michigan and Southwest Research Institute, detected the September 1999 energy burst in ultraviolet wavelengths recorded by Hubble.

NASA expands search for killer asteroids

(CNN) -- A powerful new camera will give a boost to NASA's search for larger asteroids orbiting Earth, the space agency said. The camera was installed this week for NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) system on the Oschin telescope at the Palomar Observatory, near San Diego, California.

It can provide three times more data and survey 1.5 times more sky than the NEAT camera currently operating at the Maui Space Surveillance Site's telescope in Hawaii.

"The new camera has the flexibility to do a wide and shallow sky survey, or one not-so-wide but deeper," said Steven Pravdo, NEAT project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Because the whole control system on the Oschin telescope was upgraded to a computer-controlled system, the NEAT team can operate the telescope remotely from their offices at JPL.

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