Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond.
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Watch live, even if you can’t be in northern Australia to see the total solar eclipse. The above feed is from the Slooh Space Camera team, live from Cairns, Australia – the only land site in the world to view totality. Slooh has a three-person crew at Cairns, including photographer Anjali Bermain, Astronomy Magazine’s Bob Berman, author of “The Sun’s Heartbeat”, and experienced astro-imager Matt Francis of the Prescott Observatory. Dr. Lucie Green, solar researcher at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, will join the broadcast along with Slooh’s President, Patrick Paolucci, and Slooh’s Public Outreach Coordinator, Paul Cox.
Here’s a trailer from a new movie called “Europa Report” about a near-future mission to Jupiter’s moon, Europa, in search of extraterrestrial life. From the trailer, the film looks to be of extremely high quality, and it stars Sharlto Copley (District 9), with music score from composer Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica).
And while this is a sci-fi flick, the makers of “Europa Report” say they are trying to steep it in real science.
The PR for the film is just getting underway, but they have a realistic-looking website that appears to show webcam views from a spacecraft heading to Europa.
For decades, scientists have theorized the existence of liquid water oceans on Jupiter’s moon, Europa. We’ve recently discovered new, captivating evidence that these sub-surface oceans do exist and could support life.
We’ve sent six astronauts from space programs throughout the world on a three year journey to Europa to explore its oceans and confirm these findings.
We’re proud to be at the forefront of the effort to prove the existence of extra-terrestrial life within our solar system, within our lifetimes.
And yep, like any film about spaceflight, something has to go wrong during the mission.
The release date for the film has not yet been set.
Supernova 2012fr in NGC 1365. It is the bright blue “star” directly below the galaxy core. Credit: Rolf Wahl Olsen. Click the image for larger version.
A very bright supernova has shown up in NGC 1365, the galaxy also known as the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy, visible now for southern hemisphere observers. This already elegant galaxy lies about 56 million light-years away in the constellation Fornax. The supernova, a type Ia, was discovered by Alain Klotz with the TAROT telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile on October 27, 2012. “The supernova is a very nice addition to the already highly photogenic galaxy,” said Rolf Wahl Olsen, who took the gorgeous image above. “I’m amazed by how blue it is; it’s really intense.”
Supernova 2012fr is the bright and intensely blue star directly below the galaxy core. Olsen said that as of November 10, 2012 the supernova appeared to be nearing its peak, with an R magnitude of 11.90.
“To get an idea of how bright this event is we can calculate the absolute magnitude M of the supernova using the following formula where m is the apparent magnitude and D the distance in parsecs: M = m – 5(log10(D) – 1),” Olsen wrote. “This gives an absolute magnitude of -19.27 for SN2012fr. This means that if the supernova had occurred at a distance to us similar to Betelgeuse (643 light years), then its apparent magnitude would be -12.80, same as the full Moon!”
Details about Olsen’s image:
Date: 7th and 9th November 2012
Exposure: LRGB: 205:57:56:51m, total 6hrs 9mins @ -30C
Telescope: 10″ Serrurier Truss Newtonian f/5
Camera: QSI 683wsg with Lodestar guider
Filters: Astrodon LRGB E-Series Gen 2
Taken from his observatory in Auckland, New Zealand
Scientists and interested skywatchers have been flocking to Cairns, Australia to witness one of the most spellbinding astronomical sights: a total solar eclipse. The November 13/14 total solar eclipse will only be visible in its entirety to ground-based observers watching from northern Australia, but several webcasts will be available so that people around the world can watch as well. At about 22:11:48 UT on November 13 (it will be the morning of Nov. 14th in Australia) the Moon will pass directly in front of the Sun, and totality will only last about 2 minutes, with the Sun having risen just 14 degrees above the eastern horizon. The total time of the event, from first contact to fourth contact (the end of a solar eclipse when the disk of the Moon completely passes from the disk of the Sun) will be about 3 hours.
During totality the Sun appears to have a white halo – a rare glimpse of the Sun’s million-degree plasma atmosphere, or corona, which is too washed out by the Sun’s brightness to be observed normally.
During an eclipse, “the Moon reveals the innermost corona, which manmade coronagraphs have trouble seeing,” said Shadia Habbal of the Institute for Astronomy in Hawaii, who will be in Australia for the event. “That is where all the magnetic field and physical processes responsible for heating the corona are evolving most rapidly.”
For this total solar eclipse, the path of totality will be about 174 km (108 miles) wide and will cover 14,500 km (9,000 miles) over a 3-hour period.
Proba-2 image of the solar disc taken during the total eclipse of July 2010, combined with ground-based images taken at the same time to reveal the exquisite details of the solar corona. Credit: ESA
Slooh will be having their webcast at Slooh.com, starting Tuesday, November 13th at 11:30 AM PST / 2:30 PM EST / 19:30 UTC. Viewers can watch the show on their PC or mobile device and will have the ability to ask questions to the Slooh team, including the crew located in Cairns, using the Slooh Conversations section on the Slooh homepage. Viewers will also be able to snap the live pictures directly from the Slooh homepage using Pinterest. The broadcast team includes Patrick Paolucci, Bob Berman, Lucie Green, Matt Francis and Paul Cox.
Another feed will be from the Cairns Eclipse 2012 Ustream channel, broadcast from over Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef, Australia: http://www.ustream.tv/CairnsEclipse2012, and their website is http://www.eclipse2012.org.au
This channel will be live from 11 a.m. PT (2 p.m. ET) on Nov. 13, and 5 am November 14th 2012 (AEST). It is considered the official destination website for the total solar Eclipse over Cairns and Great Barrier Reef will feature Terry Cuttle from the Astronomical Association of Queensland as the host. He will be joined by Kate Russo (eclipse chaser and author), Ben Southall (winner of the ‘Best Job in the World’ promotion and tourism ambassador), Richard Fitzpatrick (an underwater cameraman, will be live from under water) and Alan Hale (from Hale-Bopp comet who is studying comets close to the Sun which can only be seen during an eclipse).
Panasonic’s project, described as, “Filming the Sun, using the Sun” aims to capture and broadcast to the world a solar eclipse using only the power of sunlight. They’re using Panasonic’s high efficiency solar power-generating system, “HIT” to generate power with a portable battery back for power storage. They’ll then be able to broadcast the eclipse images captured on a Lumix GH2.
2012 Eclipse live from a Cairns Hot Air Balloon http://www.hotair.com.au
Up to a dozen hot air balloons floating west of Cairns, Queensland Australia, with visitors from 20 different countries will be part of a live webcast of the 2012 total solar eclipse.
Cairns City Eclipse 2012 webcam http://www.eclipsecairns.com
Can’t make it to Cairns to see the Eclipse? No problem! Just check back on November 14 before 6:39am AEST (GMT+10) to see it live on their webcam.
GLORIA Project http://live.gloria-project.eu
Videos and pictures of the eclipse will be broadcast live on the internet starting at 20:30 UT. Additionally meteorological data will be collected to allow students to perform an interactive experiment. During the broadcast there will be live commentary in Spanish and English.
The view of the Paranal Observatory: Credit: ESO/Babak Tafreshi
A new image captures the stunning view of the night sky over ESO’s Paranal Observatory, with a treasury of deep-sky objects. The image was taken by Babak Tafreshi, an astronomer, journalist and director of The World at Night (TWAN).
It shows the Carina Nebula, glowing intensely red in the middle of the image. Below Carina is the the Wishing Well Cluster (NGC 3532); then to the right is the Lambda Centauri Nebula (IC 2944) – which is also called the Running Chicken Nebula. Above this nebula and slightly to the left is the Southern Pleiades (IC 2632), an open cluster of stars that is similar to its more familiar northern namesake.
In the foreground, is three of the four Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI).
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What has Curiosity been up to lately? The rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments makes up more than half the science payload on board MSL, and it is now searching for compounds of the element carbon — including the enticing methane that has been observed in Mars’ atmosphere from telescopes and instruments on Earth. These are the elements that are associated with life, and SAM is trying to determine if methane can be detected from the surface, as well. So far, the rover has not found “definitive evidence” beyond data uncertainty of methane in Mars’ thin atmosphere. But that doesn’t close the door on the subject. It is still early in the mission, and the methane on Mars has been cyclical in nature.
“A search for methane was made on multiple nighttime runs, but so far we have no definitive detection of methane,” said Chris Webster, the team lead for MSL’s Tunable Laser Spectrometer. The instrument has detected values of no methane at all up to 5 parts per billion, but the “data uncertainty is larger than this,” Webster said. “We do plan on additional runs, of course, to look for variability.”
But, of course, methane has been detected in certain areas, not necessarily planet-wide.
The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., will analyze samples of material collected by the rover’s arm. Credit: NASA/JPL
“In the Gale Crater, at the moment, we don’t have a definite detection of methane,” said Sushil Atreya, a co-investigator with the SAM instruments. “On the other hand, the source doesn’t have to be at Gale Crater. If there is a source of methane elsewhere, it does not take very long for it to get distributed all over the planet. It takes on the order of about three months. That is all we can say at this point.”
Methane is enticing because it could indicate life of some sort, perhaps microbial life. But methane can also be produced by certain geologic processes, and recently, a team of researchers suggested that methane could even be produced by Martian dust devils.
But as Pan Conrad, deputy principal investigator for SAM says in the video above, the team will continue to explore ways in which methane could be generated and then destroyed in the Martian ecosphere, and make the most of these extremely sensitive instruments that are now on Mars.
“SAM will continue to sniff the Martian atmosphere and look for changes over time,” Conrad said. “That will tell us something about the dynamics between the exchange between the surface and the atmosphere.”
The recently launched Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) mission, which is studying the Van Allen radiation belts, has now been renamed in honor of the late James Van Allen, who discovered the radiation belts encircling Earth in 1958.
“James Van Allen was a true pioneer in astrophysics,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “His ground breaking research paved the way for current and future space exploration. These spacecraft now not only honor his iconic name but his mark on science.”
During his career, Van Allen was the principal investigator for scientific investigations on 24 Earth satellites and planetary missions, beginning with the first successful American satellite, Explorer I, and continuing with Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. He also helped develop the first plans for an International Geophysical Year was held in 1957. Van Allen, who worked at APL during and after World War II, also is credited with discovery of a new moon of Saturn in 1979, as well as radiation belts around that planet.
Artist concept of the Van Allen Probes. Credit: NASA
Launched Aug. 30, 2012 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the Van Allen Probes comprise the first dual-spacecraft mission specifically created to investigate the radiation belts that surround Earth. These two belts encircle the planet and are filled with highly charged particles.
The belts are affected by solar storms and coronal mass ejections and sometimes swell dramatically. When this occurs, they can pose dangers to communications, GPS satellites and human spaceflight activities.
“After only two months in orbit, the Van Allen Probes have made significant contributions to our understanding of the radiation belts,” says APL Director Ralph Semmel. “The science and data from these amazing twin spacecraft will allow for more effective and safe space technologies in the decades to come. APL is proud to have built and to operate this new resource for NASA and our nation, and we are proud to have the mission named for one of APL’s original staff.”
We at Universe Today really appreciate the work that Camilla the Rubber Chicken does in her role of education and public outreach. This new video from NASA explains why many people agree that she puts a completely different spin on getting people interested in space and science. As Camilla once told us, “As you know, I not only want to educate about our Sun and space weather, but I want to inspire and show kids (and adults) how much fun science and engineering really is,” she said via email. “Team SDO’s goal has always been to encourage more girls into STEM careers,” … and to make people feel comfortable asking questions, too.
Here’s a recent view of Jupiter, with its moon Europa just coming into view from behind the planet, as seen by Efrain Morales of the Jaicoa Observatory in Puerto Rico. Why two images? This is a different way to see it in 3-D — just focus on the center between the 2 images and kind of cross your eyes. Not everyone can see the effect, but its pretty cool when it works. Click the image for a larger version.
Efrain took the image on November 4th, at 07:20 UTC. Also visible are the Great Red Spot and Oval Ba transiting across the Jovian disk.
Equipment: LX200ACF 12 in. OTA, CGE mount, Flea3 Ccd, TeleVue 3x barlows, Astronomik RGB filter set.
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Today would have been Carl Sagan’s 78th birthday, and the past few years November 9th, the anniversary of his birth, has been designated as “Carl Sagan Day” by people who appreciate Sagan’s influence — not only on science, but also the public’s understanding of it. Sagan passed away 16 years ago, but his words and inspiration live on for many of us through his books and recordings.
Sagan was a co-founder of The Planetary Society, and this evening (Friday, Nov. 9, 2012) at 7 pm PST TPS will be webcasting a live event to commemorate Sagan’s life and influence. Click here for the webcast link, as well as additional information.
Below is part one of a 3 part series of Sagan’s final interview with Charlie Rose on May 27, 1996. He discussed science, pseudo-science, religion, and his struggle with the disease that ultimately ended his life, myelodysplasia.
If you have a favorite Sagan quote or memory, feel free to share it in the comments.
