Featured Posts
Tom's Astronomy Blog
20 Jul 2010, 20:27 UTC
Check out this latest Cassini release. It’s a really cool picture of Saturn’s F-ring showing the wake channels made as the little moon Prometheus moves around it. The picture is a bit hard to interpet, so here is a page with movie choices that will help show what is going on, sorry, not great for [...] The shepherding moon Prometheus creating waves and building snowballs in the Saturn F - ring. Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI Check out this latest Cassini release. It’s a really cool picture of Saturn’s F-ring showing the wake channels made as the little moon Prometheus moves around it. The picture is a bit hard to interpet, so here is a page with movie choices that will help show what is going on, sorry, not great for dial up users, but the description will help along with the main press release below. Now we know why the ring rarely looks the same every time we see it. Here’s the Cassini press release to better describe what’s going on: While orbiting Saturn for the last six years, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has kept a close eye on the collisions and disturbances in the gas giant’s rings. They ...
Cassini Sees Building Snowballs
20 Jul 2010, 20:27 UTC
Check out this latest Cassini release. It’s a really cool picture of Saturn’s F-ring showing the wake channels made as the little moon Prometheus moves around it. The picture is a bit hard to interpet, so here is a page with movie choices that will help show what is going on, sorry, not great for [...] The shepherding moon Prometheus creating waves and building snowballs in the Saturn F - ring. Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI Check out this latest Cassini release. It’s a really cool picture of Saturn’s F-ring showing the wake channels made as the little moon Prometheus moves around it. The picture is a bit hard to interpet, so here is a page with movie choices that will help show what is going on, sorry, not great for dial up users, but the description will help along with the main press release below. Now we know why the ring rarely looks the same every time we see it. Here’s the Cassini press release to better describe what’s going on: While orbiting Saturn for the last six years, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has kept a close eye on the collisions and disturbances in the gas giant’s rings. They ...
A Sky Full of Stars
20 Jul 2010, 19:10 UTC
Celebrating the 41st anniversary of humankind’s first footsteps on the Moon, we’ve two fantastic videos to share! Both are from Gizmodo. Just click on the titles to watch and learn more. Apollo 11 Landing with New Audio and Multiple Cameras A Close-up View of the Apollo 11 Launch ENJOY!
41 Years Ago, Today!
20 Jul 2010, 19:10 UTC
Celebrating the 41st anniversary of humankind’s first footsteps on the Moon, we’ve two fantastic videos to share! Both are from Gizmodo. Just click on the titles to watch and learn more. Apollo 11 Landing with New Audio and Multiple Cameras A Close-up View of the Apollo 11 Launch ENJOY!
StarStruck
20 Jul 2010, 18:09 UTC
Curiosity, as compared with the Mars rover Spirit. —Image courtesy NASA/JPL No matter where you stand on the future of human space flight, if you want to visit other worlds, you are probably a fan of robotic exploration. Still, there're a lot of hurdles to putting even a robot on another planet: budget, scientific squabbling, budget cuts, technological hang-ups, budget shortfalls, political reviews. And did I mention issues with the budget? But putting everything else aside, the scariest moment in any planetary landing attempt is, well, the landing. When you've poured years of your life and millions of tax dollars into a little bot with big promise, getting it safely to its destination is the nerve-wracking moment everyone is waiting for. For the Phoenix Mars lander, engineers dubbed the window when the craft entered Mars's atmosphere and lost contact until it set foot near the Martian north pole the "seven minutes of terror." Well, the folks at NASA must be fans of horror movies, because for their next Mars lander, the roving science lab dubbed Curiosity, they're gonna film and broadcast the moments just before touchdown. The MARDI, with a Swiss Army knife for scale. —Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science ...
NASA to Broadcast Mars Lander Descent
20 Jul 2010, 18:09 UTC
Curiosity, as compared with the Mars rover Spirit. —Image courtesy NASA/JPL No matter where you stand on the future of human space flight, if you want to visit other worlds, you are probably a fan of robotic exploration. Still, there're a lot of hurdles to putting even a robot on another planet: budget, scientific squabbling, budget cuts, technological hang-ups, budget shortfalls, political reviews. And did I mention issues with the budget? But putting everything else aside, the scariest moment in any planetary landing attempt is, well, the landing. When you've poured years of your life and millions of tax dollars into a little bot with big promise, getting it safely to its destination is the nerve-wracking moment everyone is waiting for. For the Phoenix Mars lander, engineers dubbed the window when the craft entered Mars's atmosphere and lost contact until it set foot near the Martian north pole the "seven minutes of terror." Well, the folks at NASA must be fans of horror movies, because for their next Mars lander, the roving science lab dubbed Curiosity, they're gonna film and broadcast the moments just before touchdown. The MARDI, with a Swiss Army knife for scale. —Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science ...
Centauri Dreams
20 Jul 2010, 18:00 UTC
Solar Sails in Brooklyn I should probably clean out my office, and would, if I could find the time, but things keep happening in the deep space community and I keep writing about them. I had the program for ISSS 2010 (the Second International Symposium on Solar Sailing) right beside me when I started to [...] Solar Sails in Brooklyn I should probably clean out my office, and would, if I could find the time, but things keep happening in the deep space community and I keep writing about them. I had the program for ISSS 2010 (the Second International Symposium on Solar Sailing) right beside me when I started to write yesterday’s entry, and by the time I got to the part on the conference, the program had disappeared into the wilderness of printouts, notebooks and letters. Thus I missed the fact that Colin McInnes would be in attendance at the sessions, a major addition to the already stellar lineup. McInnes could be said to have written ‘the’ book on solar sailing, a densely packed tome that lays out the principles and speculates on future missions. Meanwhile, it’s heartening to see how international the solar sail effort has been ...
Musings on Sails and Stars
20 Jul 2010, 18:00 UTC
Solar Sails in Brooklyn I should probably clean out my office, and would, if I could find the time, but things keep happening in the deep space community and I keep writing about them. I had the program for ISSS 2010 (the Second International Symposium on Solar Sailing) right beside me when I started to [...] Solar Sails in Brooklyn I should probably clean out my office, and would, if I could find the time, but things keep happening in the deep space community and I keep writing about them. I had the program for ISSS 2010 (the Second International Symposium on Solar Sailing) right beside me when I started to write yesterday’s entry, and by the time I got to the part on the conference, the program had disappeared into the wilderness of printouts, notebooks and letters. Thus I missed the fact that Colin McInnes would be in attendance at the sessions, a major addition to the already stellar lineup. McInnes could be said to have written ‘the’ book on solar sailing, a densely packed tome that lays out the principles and speculates on future missions. Meanwhile, it’s heartening to see how international the solar sail effort has been ...
Weirdwarp
20 Jul 2010, 16:07 UTC
Extremophiles are organisms that thrive in harsh environments where you would think nothing could live. When looking at extremophiles on Earth and the environments they live in it does make you wonder why organisms haven’t been found on other planets yet.
Extremophiles on Other Celestial Bodies?
20 Jul 2010, 16:07 UTC
Extremophiles are organisms that thrive in harsh environments where you would think nothing could live. When looking at extremophiles on Earth and the environments they live in it does make you wonder why organisms haven’t been found on other planets yet.
Discovery News - Space News
20 Jul 2010, 14:50 UTC
The tracking system could prevent space debris from colliding with spacecraft and satellites.
Laser System to Monitor Space Junk
20 Jul 2010, 14:50 UTC
The tracking system could prevent space debris from colliding with spacecraft and satellites.
Space Fellowship
20 Jul 2010, 14:26 UTC
Hubble's sharp vision reveals a crisp dust lane dividing the galaxy into two halves. The image highlights the galaxy's structure: a subtle, reddish bulge surrounding a bright nucleus, a blue disk of stars running parallel to the dust lane, and a transparent outer halo. Some faint, wispy trails of dust can be seen meandering away from the disk of the galaxy out into the bulge and inner halo of the galaxy. The outer halo is dotted with numerous gravitationally bound clusters of nearly a mill [...]
Picture of the Day - Unique Hubble view of a Disk Galaxy
20 Jul 2010, 14:26 UTC
Hubble's sharp vision reveals a crisp dust lane dividing the galaxy into two halves. The image highlights the galaxy's structure: a subtle, reddish bulge surrounding a bright nucleus, a blue disk of stars running parallel to the dust lane, and a transparent outer halo. Some faint, wispy trails of dust can be seen meandering away from the disk of the galaxy out into the bulge and inner halo of the galaxy. The outer halo is dotted with numerous gravitationally bound clusters of nearly a mill [...]
Spaceport America Construction Status
20 Jul 2010, 14:17 UTC
Spaceport America THF north east view. Image courtesy of KRQE - Bob Martin
20 Jul 2010, 14:17 UTC
Bad Astronomy
20 Jul 2010, 13:22 UTC
Emily Lakdawalla — scientist, blogger, and all around cool chick — has just posted a totally awesome scale diagram comparing every asteroid and comet visited by spacecraft. It features pictures of all the rocks, each of which she has carefully resized so you can see just how big they are relative to each other: Whoa. Look how big Lutetia, just visited by Rosetta, is compared to everything else! And yet, at 130 km across, it’s a dot compared to our Moon. In fact, you could smash together all the known asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter and they’d be far smaller than our rocky satellite. Still, small doesn’t mean "uninteresting". These rocks in Emily’s diagram are all fascinating beasts, and the more we learn about them the more compelling they become. And there’s more to come, with the Dawn mission about to see the big asteroids Vesta and Ceres up close… and go read Emily’s blog about this to see how they’d fit on the diagram (hint, they don’t, and by a long shot). You’ll also find a much larger version of the diagram there, and you really, really should look at it. Wow.
