November 19th, 2009
Spirit Rover Makes Progress
A little good news for Spirit! The rover successfully moved; not
very much, but its the first step of a planned two-step motion to try
and get Spirit free from a sand trap on Mars.
On on Sol 2090 (Nov. 19), the rover spun its wheels for the equivalent
of 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) in the forward direction, and the center of
the rover moved approximately 12 millimeters (0.5 inch) forward, 7
millimeters (0.3 inch) to the left and about 4 millimeters (0.2 inch)
down. Again, not much, but its the first good news and good movement
the rover has had in months. Filed under: Mars, Missions | 3 Comments » November 19th, 2009
Large Hadron Collider Could Re-Start This Weekend
Filed under: Physics, Science | 5 Comments » November 19th, 2009
Plasma Rocket Could Help Pick Up Space Trash Artist concept of a VASIMR. Credit: Ad Astra Franklin Chang Diaz's proposed VASIMR rocket engine could create
very versatile spacecraft. Not only does the plasma-fueled rocket have
the potential to make a trip to Mars in just over a month, it could also help clean up space trash in Earth orbit. “Our goal is to be able to have a garbage truck that will be picking up all of these objects at various orbits,” astronaut Chang Diaz said in an article in the Global Post. The debris could put into an “orbital graveyard,” he added, “or we could actually launch them to the sun and drive them to the sun, which is kind of the ultimate, cosmic dump.” Filed under: Space Flight | 5 Comments » November 19th, 2009
Black Hole Drive Could Power Future Starships Image credit: NASA What would happen if humans could deliberately create a black hole? Well, for starters we might just unlock the ultimate energy source to create the ultimate spacecraft engine — a potential "black hole-drive" – to propel ships to the stars. It turns out black holes are not black at all; they give off "Hawking radiation"
that causes them to lose energy (and therefore mass) over time. For
large black holes, the amount of radiation produced is miniscule, but
very small black holes rapidly turn their mass into a huge amount of
energy. Filed under: Black Holes | 15 Comments » November 18th, 2009
"X" Marks Puzzling Galactic Bulge
Filed under: Hubble, galaxies | 33 Comments » November 18th, 2009
The 'Camera That Saved Hubble' Goes to Smithsonian Museum
Filed under: Hubble | 3 Comments » July 21st, 2009
Thirty-Meter Telescope Headed for Mauna KeaWritten by Anne Minard ShareThis 
The Thirty Meter Telescope, which is vying to be the inaugural member of an emerging class of giant eyes in the sky, is headed for the Mauna Kea in Hawaii. That means the other contending site, Cerro Armazones in Chile, is off the drawing board. Richard Ellis, a TMT board member, said the choice was a tough one, but Mauna Kea had scientific advantages. "Mauna Kea is a higher site. It is actually drier, and the average temperature fluctuates less from day to day and during the day to night cycle than the Chilean site," he said, during a press conference this afternoon to announce the decision. "Much of the astronomy will be at infrared wavelengths, where the dryness is an advantage." He added that the Hawaii boasts slightly better atmospheric qualities, including lower turbulence over the site. When completed in 2018, the TMT will enable astronomers to detect and study light from the earliest stars and galaxies, analyze the formation of planets around nearby stars, and test many of the fundamental laws of physics. Based on the scientific model of the twin Keck telescopes, the core technology of TMT will be a 30-meter primary mirror composed of 492 segments. The TMT project is an international partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and ACURA, an organization of Canadian universities. The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) joined TMT as a Collaborating Institution in 2008. The TMT project has completed its $77 million design development phase with primary financial support of $50 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and $22 million from Canada. The project has now entered the early construction phase, with an additional $200 million pledge from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Caltech and the University of California each have agreed to raise matching funds of $50 million to bring the construction total to $300 million, and the Canadian partners propose to supply the enclosure, the telescope structure, and the first light adaptive optics. The TMT faces competition from the Giant Magellan Telescope to usher in the age of the giants. See past Universe Today coverage of the race here. Source: TMT site Filed under: Astronomy Related stories on Universe Today
May 24th, 2009
UT Briefs: Shuttle Lands, Re-living Phoenix Atlantis touches down in California. Credit: NASA Space Shuttle Lands Space shuttle Atlantis landed safely in California on Sunday morning
after “dynamic and unpredictable” weather kept the orbiter from
returning to Florida. Atlantis touched down on runway 22 of Edwards Air
Force Base at 11:39 am EDT (1539 GMT) Sunday, May 24 the first of two
opportunities to land the shuttle in California. Atlantis spent nearly
13 days in orbit on the STS-125 mission, successfully repairing and
upgrading the Hubble Space Telescope
during a series of five spacewalks. Atlantis will be ferried to Kennedy
Space Center on top of a modified 747 in about a week. Next shuttle
mission: STS-127, slated for liftoff on June 13, on a trip to the
International Space Station. Filed under: Missions, Space Shuttle | 1 Comment » May 23rd, 2009
Bolden Nominated as NASA Administrator; Shuttle Landing Delayed Obama and a White House Aide met with Charles Bolden on May 19. Official White House photo by Pete Souza. About the same time space shuttle Atlantis’ landing was waved off today due to continued rainy weather in Florida, the White House announced that former shuttle commander Charles Bolden Jr. will be nominated as NASA’s next administrator. President Obama also chose Lori Garver to be Bolden’s deputy administrator. Obama said, “These talented individuals will help put NASA on course to boldly push the boundaries of science, aeronautics and exploration in the 21st century and ensure the long-term vibrancy of America’s space program.” Click to continue… Filed under: NASA, Space Flight, Space Shuttle | 7 Comments » May 22nd, 2009
Answer to This Week’s WITU Challenge Now Posted
Filed under: Where In the Universe? | No Comments » May 22nd, 2009
More Stunning Images From the Hubble Servicing Mission
Filed under: Hubble, Space Flight, Space Shuttle | 6 Comments » May 22nd, 2009
Weather Keeps Shuttle Crew in Space Another Day
STS-125 crew members aboard Atlantis (pictured above) will hang out at least a day longer in space, following foul weather that prevented a timely landing today at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. And the forecast isn’t looking any sunnier for at least a little while. Filed under: Missions, NASA, Space Shuttle | 7 Comments » May 22nd, 2009
Opportunity Reveals Long-time Water, Winds at Victoria
A sizable collaboration of researchers has unveiled an enormous set of data from NASA’s Opportunity rover today — data that testify to the rover’s lucky longevity, and paint a picture of climate events that have shaped Victoria Crater, shown in this NASA/JPL-Caltech image. The climate history is vast and compelling, including dramatic floods and terrain-shaping winds spanning billions of years. The data appear in today’s issue of the journal Science. Filed under: Mars | 4 Comments » May 21st, 2009
IYA Live Telescope Today: M104, NGC 6231, NGC 55 and Comet C/2009 G1 (STEREO)
Filed under: IYA Live Telescope Library | 3 Comments » May 21st, 2009
Disappearing Accretion Disk Is Missing Link in Pulsar Birth
A now-you-see-it, now-you don’t accretion disk (white and blue in the artist’s rendering at left) has tipped astronomers to the birth of a superfast, “millisecond” pulsar that was happening right before their eyes — er, their radio telescopes. The new finding confirms the long-suspected evolutionary connection between a neutron star and a millisecond pulsar: they are two life stages of the same object. Anne Archibald, of McGill University in Montreal, Canada and her colleagues announced their discovery in the May 21 online issue of the journal Science. Filed under: Astronomy | 1 Comment » May 21st, 2009
With Moon Rocks in Hand, Parazynski Reaches Mt. Everest Peak
Filed under: Earth, Extreme Life | 1 Comment » May 21st, 2009
A Brotherhood of Hubble Warriors: Jeff Hoffman Reflects on HST Repair Missions Hoffman, on the robotic arm, works with Story Musgrave on an EVA on STS-61. Credit: NASA Not surprisingly, former astronaut Jeff Hoffman has been watching the current Hubble servicing mission with interest. After all, he was a member of the first repair crew that visited the telescope in December 1993, part of the team which essentially rescued the Hubble program from what could have been a disaster. But, now Hoffman is impressed with this current crew and what they’ve accomplished, saying they are part of a “brotherhood of Hubble warriors.” And Hoffman is feeling a little nostalgic, too. Filed under: Hubble | 2 Comments » May 20th, 2009
IYA Live Telescope Today: Jupiter and Neptune Conjunction - M19
Filed under: IYA Live Telescope Library | 1 Comment » May 20th, 2009
Where In The Universe #55
Are you ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Take a look and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. As usual, we’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess. UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below. Don’t peek before you make your guess. Filed under: Where In the Universe? | 13 Comments » May 20th, 2009
SRB Videos, A Toast to Recycled Urine and Other Misc. Spaceflight Notes
Now about that toast… Filed under: Hubble, Space Flight, Space Shuttle, Space Station | 6 Comments » April 16th, 2009
Dust Storms Picking Up on Mars
Filed under: Mars, Missions | 1 Comment » April 16th, 2009
Kepler’s “First Light” Images
The image above zooms into a small portion — just 0.2 percent –of
Kepler’s full field of view, and shows an an expansive,
100-square-degree patch of sky in our Milky Way galaxy, and a cluster
of stars located about 13,000 light-years from Earth, called NGC 6791,
can be seen in the upper right corner. These images were taken on April
8, 2009, one day after Kepler’s dust cover was jettisoned. See more below. Filed under: Extrasolar Planets, Missions | 14 Comments » April 16th, 2009
Researchers Describe ‘Most Spectacular and Most Disturbed’ Galaxy Cluster Composite image of MACSJ0717. Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/IfA/C. Ma et al.); Optical (NASA/STScI/IfA/C. Ma et al.) It’s hot. It’s crowded. And it’s one of the most raucuous space parties astronomers have ever seen. A research team using a combination of three powerful telescopes is spilling the beans on the galaxy cluster MACSJ0717.5+3745 (MACSJ0717 for short), located about 5.4 billion light years from Earth. The wild system contains four separate galaxy clusters undergoing a triple merger — the first time such a phenomenon has been documented — and that’s just the beginning. Filed under: Astronomy, galaxies | 36 Comments » April 16th, 2009
NASA Weighing Debris Hit Risk for Hubble Repair Mission The odds of Loss Of Crew and Vehicle for the STS-125 mission. Credit: NASASpaceflight.com There’s good news and bad news for the upcoming Hubble repair mission. The good news is that the statistical threat posed to space shuttle Atlantis and her crew by micro-meteoroid orbiting debris (MMOD) is currently no greater than last year, even with the collision of two satellites in February and other recent satellite breakups. The chance of the shuttle being hit by MMOD during a mission to Hubble is 1 in 185. But that’s also the bad news. The 1 in 185 chance of a catastrophic impact to a shuttle in Hubble’s orbit is, obviously, quite high, and higher than NASA’s limit of 1 in 200. The final decision of whether this risk is acceptable will be discussed at a Flight Readiness Review meeting on April 30. It is anticipated that NASA will override the limit and accept the risk. Without a servicing mission by a space shuttle crew, the telescope is not expected to last more than another year or two. Click to continue… Filed under: Space Shuttle | 9 Comments » April 16th, 2009
Bridge Between the Stars - NGC 602: Hubble Visualization by Jukka Metsavainio NGC 602 Parallel Hubble Visualization by Jukka Metsavainio It’s been awhile hasn’t it? Time may have passed, but absence makes the heart grow fonder. For those of you who have missed our very special dimensional looks into the Cosmos, then it’s high time we let our minds and eyes relax and we take a 200 thousand light-year distant journey towards the edge of the Small Magellanic Cloud for a look at a bright, young open cluster of stars known as NGC 602… Click to continue… Filed under: Astronomy, Astrophotos | 9 Comments » April 15th, 2009
Constraining the Orbits of Planet X and Nemesis Artists impression of the hypothetical star, Nemesis (Wikipedia) If Planet X was out there, where would it be? This question posed by
an Italian researcher turns out to be a lot more involved than you’d
think. As opposed to all the 2012 Filed under: 2012, Astronomy | 39 Comments » April 15th, 2009
Satellites Show How Earth Moved During Earthquake An Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) interferogram. Credit: IREA-CNR If you have ever experienced an earthquake, you know that the Earth literally moves beneath your feet. And now there’s satellite data to show just how much. Scientists studying satellite radar data from ESA’s Envisat and the Italian Space Agency’s COSMO-SkyMed, have been able analyze the movement of Earth during and after a recent earthquake in central Italy. A 6.3 earthquake shook the town of L’Aquila in on April 6, 2009, and satellite data is being used to map surface deformation in the Earth that took place after the quake and the numerous aftershocks that followed. Click to continue… Filed under: Earth Observation | 12 Comments » April 14th, 2009
The Anatomy of a Solar Explosion in 3-D
“We can now see a CME from the time it leaves the solar surface
until it reaches Earth, and we can reconstruct the event in 3D directly
from the images,” said Angelos Vourlidas, a solar physicist at the
Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, and project scientist for the
Sun Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation aboard
STEREO. In the video above, see some of the 3-D imagery, and hear
Vourlidas talk about about the new findings. Filed under: Solar Astronomy | 9 Comments » April 14th, 2009
Catching Up With Comet Yi-SWAN Comet Yi-SWAN Rough Locator Chart - April 14/16 Now that the Moon is out of the early evening sky, far northern observers are out in force hunting down Comet C/2009 Yi-SWAN… and it’s there! In 10X50 binoculars it appears like a very faint, small globular cluster, but definitely has the signature of a comet in a 4.5″ telescope. Surprisingly enough, it’s not very hard to find. Would you like a hand? Click to continue… Filed under: Comets | 4 Comments » April 14th, 2009
Life of the ISS May be Extended The ISS. Credit: NASA Fifteen partnering nations have agreed in principle to extend the life of the International Space Station, and keep it operating through 2020, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. That is at least five years beyond the current deadline. Until now, the major partners – NASA, ESA and the Russian Space Agency – hadn’t committed to keeping the station operational past 2015, and questions loomed about the future of the ISS and its worthiness as a platform for scientific research. An extension could give new momentum to science, but may force NASA to siphon money away from other projects – like the new Constellation program – in order to pay for the additional years of operation. Click to continue…
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