Photos of the International Space Station taken from the ground, using a 10-inch Newtonian telescope and monochromatic camera. Credit: Ralf Vandebergh
Here’s your morning photographic space delight: the International Space Station and the last European automated transfer vehicle (ATV), Georges Lemaître, taken using a camera and 10-inch Newtonian telescope.
The photographer, Ralf Vandebergh, captured these images as the ATV flew to the space station. The ATV launched flawlessly on July 30 and is expected to meet up with the station on Aug. 12. Check out pictures of the cargo vehicle below the jump.
The vehicle will stay docked to the space station for six months before making a planned re-entry in the atmosphere with a load of trash. The European Space Agency plans to track its fiery destruction to better design cargo vehicles in the future.
“The project is proceeding under our ‘Design for Demise’ effort to design space hardware in such a way that it is less likely to survive reentry and potentially endanger the public,”said Neil Murray, who is leading the project at the European Space Agency (ESA), in a July statement.
“Design for Demise in turn is part of the agency’s clean space initiative, seeking to render the space industry more environmentally friendly in space as well as on Earth.”
Pictures of the last European automated transfer vehicle going to the International Space Station in 2014. Pictures taken using a 10-inch Newtonian telescope and monochromatic camera. Credit: Ralf Vandebergh
Wow! Check out this video of the Moon passing in front of Saturn from a viewpoint in Brisbane, Australia. This type of phenomenon, called an occultation, happens when one celestial body passes in front of the other from an observer’s standpoint. You can see some information about a June 10 occultation of Saturn, for example, at this link.
“There has been a fair amount of post-processing done on the images to get to this result. The first stage was to adjust the source images so that detail was visible both on Saturn and on the Moon. This is because the two objects are quite different in brightness, and so each individual exposure results in a slightly over-exposed Moon and a slightly under-exposed Saturn,” wrote Teale Britstra, who created the video, on Vimeo.
“After initial processing, the series of images were imported into video editing software, and the resulting footage stabilized to eliminate some small tracking errors between shots,” Britstra continued.
“There was also one LARGE tracking error, where I had to physically move the telescope. This was because the Moon was sinking towards the western horizon and some nearby, large trees which would have obscured the shot had the scope not been moved. This can be seen in the resulting footage as the period where the Moon appears to slow down and slightly change direction.”
Animation of Pluto and Charon showing nearly a full rotation (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)
Now here’s something I guarantee you’ve never seen before: a video of the dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon Charon showing the two distinctly separate worlds actually in motion around each other! Captured by the steadily-approaching New Horizons spacecraft from July 19–24, the 12 images that comprise this animation were acquired with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument from distances of 267 million to 262 million miles (429 million to 422 million km) and show nearly a full orbital rotation. Absolutely beautiful!
For a close-up video of the two worlds in motion, click below:
Pluto and Charon rotation movie from New Horizons (enlarged view)
Pluto and Charon are seen circling a central gravitational point known as the barycenter, which accounts for the wobbling motion. Since Charon is 1/12th the mass of Pluto the center of mass between the two actually lies a bit outside Pluto’s radius, making their little gravitational “dance” readily apparent.
(The same effect happens with the Earth and Moon too, but since the barycenter lies 1,700 km below Earth’s surface it’s not nearly as obvious.)
“The image sequence showing Charon revolving around Pluto set a record for close range imaging of Pluto—they were taken from 10 times closer to the planet than the Earth is,” said New Horizons mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute. “But we’ll smash that record again and again, starting in January, as approach operations begin.”
Artist concept of the New Horizons spacecraft. Credit: NASA
Launched January 19, 2006, New Horizons is now in the final year of its journey to the Pluto system. On August 25 it will pass the orbit of Neptune – which, coincidentally, is 25 years to the day after Voyager 2’s closest approach – and then it’s on to Pluto and Charon, which New Horizons will become the first spacecraft to fly by on July 14, 2015, at distances of 10,000 and 27,000 km respectively. Find out where New Horizons is right now here.
Source: New Horizons
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
NAVCAM image taken by Rosetta on 5 August 2014 from a distance of about 145 km from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Image has been rotated 180 degrees. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM
Where would you land here?
Newly released NAVCAM image taken by Rosetta on 5 August 2014 from a distance of about 145 km from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Image has been rotated 180 degrees. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM[/caption]
Following the flawless and history making arrival of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft at its long sought destination of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Wednesday, Aug. 6, the goal of conducting ground breaking science at this utterly alien and bizarre icy wanderer that looks like a ‘Scientific Disneyland’ can actually begin.
Rosetta is the first spacecraft in history to rendezvous with a comet and enter orbit – after a more than 10 year chase of 6.4 billion kilometers (4 Billion miles) along a highly complex trajectory from Earth. The arrival event was broadcast live from mission control at ESA’s spacecraft operations centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. Read my complete arrival story – here.
So what’s ahead for Rosetta? Another audacious and history making event – Landing on the comet!
A top priority task is also another highly complex task – ‘Finding a landing strip’ on the bizarre world of Comet 67P for the piggybacked Philae comet lander equipped with 10 science instruments.
“The challenge ahead is to map the surface and find a landing strip,” said Andrea Accomazzo, ESA Rosetta Spacecraft Operations Manager, at the Aug. 6 ESA webcast.
That will be no easy task based on the spectacular imagery captured by the OSIRIS high resolution science camera and the Navcam camera that has revealed an utterly wacky and incredibly differentiated world like none other we have ever visited or expected when the mission was conceived.
Magnificently detailed new navcam images were released by ESA today, Aug, 7, streaming back to Earth across some 405 million kilometers (250 million miles) of interplanetary space – see above and below.
The team will have its hand full trying to find a safe spot for touchdown.
“We now see lots of structure and details. Lots of topography is visible on the surface,” said Holger Sierks, principal investigator for Rosetta’s OSIRIS camera from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, during the webcast.
“There is a big depression and 150 meter high cliffs, rubble piles, and also we see smooth areas and plains. It’s really fantastic”
“We see a village of house size boulders. Some about 10 meters in size and bigger and they vary in brightness. And some with sharp edges. We don’t know their composition yet,” explained Sierks.
Newly released NAVCAM image taken on 6 August 2014 from a distance of about 96 km from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM
The key to finding a safe landing site for Philae will be quickly conducting a global comet mapping campaign with OSIRIS, Navcam and the remaining suite of 11 science instruments to provide a detailed scientific study of the physical characteristics and chemical composition of the surface.
They also need to determine which areas are hard or soft.
Holger Sierks, OSIRIS principal investigator, discusses spectacular hi res comet images returned so far by Rosetta during the Aug. 6 ESA webcast from mission control at ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany. Credit: Roland Keller
“Our first clear views of the comet have given us plenty to think about,” says Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist.
“Is this double-lobed structure built from two separate comets that came together in the Solar System’s history, or is it one comet that has eroded dramatically and asymmetrically over time? Rosetta, by design, is in the best place to study one of these unique objects.”
The image of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was taken by Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow-angle camera on 3 August 2014 from a distance of 285 km. Credits: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
Yesterday’s (Aug. 6) critical final thruster firing placed the 1.3 Billion euro robotic emissary from Earth into a triangular shaped orbit about 100 kilometers (62 miles) above and in front of the comet’s incredibly varied surface.
Therefore the initial mapping will be conducted from the 100 km (62 mi.) standoff distance.
Since the landing is currently targeted for November 11, 2014, in barely three months time there is not a moment to waste.
“Over the next few months, in addition to characterizing the comet nucleus and setting the bar for the rest of the mission, we will begin final preparations for another space history first: landing on a comet,” says Taylor.
The team will identify up to five possible landing sites by late August and expect to choose the primary site by mid-September.
Then the team has to plan and build the programming and maneuvers for the final timeline to implement the sequence of events leading to the nailbiting landing.
With Rosetta now travelling in a series of 100 kilometer-long (62 mile-long) triangular arcs in front of the comet lasting about 3 days each, it will also be firing thrusters at each apex.
After catching up with the comet Rosetta will slightly overtake and enter orbit from the ‘front’ of the comet as both the spacecraft and 67P/CG move along their orbits around the Sun. Rosetta will carry out a complex series of manoeuvres to reduce the separation between the spacecraft and comet from around 100 km to 25-30 km. From this close orbit, detailed mapping will allow scientists to determine the landing site for the mission’s Philae lander. Immediately prior to the deployment of Philae in November, Rosetta will come to within just 2.5 km of the comet’s nucleus. This animation is not to scale; Rosetta’s solar arrays span 32 m, and the comet is approximately 4 km wide. Credit: ESA–C. Carreau
But it will also gradually edge closer over the next six weeks to about 50 km distance and then even closer to lower Rosetta’s altitude about Comet 67P until the spacecraft is captured by the comet’s gravity.
In November 2014, Rosetta will attempt another historic first when it deploys the Philae science lander from an altitude of just about 2.5 kilometers above the comet for the first ever attempt to land on a comet’s nucleus.
The three-legged lander will fire harpoons and use ice screws to anchor itself to the 4 kilometer (2.5 mile) wide comet’s surface. Philae will collect stereo and panoramic images and also drill into and sample its incredibly varied surface.
How will Philae land?
Stefan Ulamec, Philae Lander Manager from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) talked about the challenges of landing in a low gravity environment during the ESA webcast.
“The touchdown will be at a speed of just 1 m/s,” Ulamec explained. “This is like walking and bouncing against a wall.”
Details in an upcoming story!
Why study comets?
Comets are leftover remnants from the formation of the solar system. Scientists believe they delivered a vast quantity of water to Earth. They may have also seeded Earth with organic molecules.
ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft on final approach to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in early August 2014. This collage of navcam imagery from Rosetta was taken on Aug. 1, 2, 3 and 4 from distances of 1026 km, 500 km, 300 km and 234 km. Not to scale. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – Collage/Processing: Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer- kenkremer.com
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Rosetta, Curiosity, Opportunity, Orion, SpaceX, Boeing, Orbital Sciences, commercial space, MAVEN, MOM, Mars and more Earth and Planetary science and human spaceflight news.
ESA’s Rosetta Spacecraft nears final approach to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in late July 2014. This collage of imagery from Rosetta combines Navcam camera images at right taken nearing final approach from July 25 (3000 km distant) to July 31, 2014 (1327 km distant), with OSIRIS wide angle camera image at left of comet’s expanding coma cloud on July 25. Images to scale and contrast enhanced to show further detail. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM/OSIRIS/MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA Collage/Processing: Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer
The International Space Station (ISS) makes a 71º maximum elevation pass over the Little Kennebec Bay, in Roque Bluffs, Maine. The photo is a five-frame vertical panorama with the ISS's path composited.
Credit and copyright: David Murr.
How would you like to have one of your astrophotos sent up to the astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station? Since arriving on the ISS back in May, astronaut Reid Wiseman has been posting beautiful images on social media of the International Space Station passing overhead, taken by people from all around the world.
There’s a dedicated team of people working behind the scenes back on Earth to make sure Wiseman and his crewmates get to see as many images as possible. This is all part of the #SpotTheStation, a project to get people to look up and see the ISS — to increase the “visibility” off the space station, so to speak — to make the general public more aware of the station and what benefits it brings to science. Of course, being able to see the space station fly overhead is always a fun experience!
The #SpotTheStation project is getting photographers more involved, too. We get several images a week posted on our Flickr site of space station passes (see the gorgeous one above by David Murr).
Take a look at some of the recent images @Astro_Reid has posted on Twitter:
How do you get your images sent up to the ISS? You can email your picture to [email protected] and include a description of your images of the ISS (location, date, times, maybe exposure information and techniques involved). Please also include your Twitter handle, Facebook or website information.
You can also just share your image through your social media outlets using #SpotTheStation hashtag.
How do you find out how to see the ISS? There are several different tools:
NASA’s Spot the Station website: Enter your Country, Region, City along with an email address or mobile phone number. Then give your preference for notifications in the evening, morning or both and that’s it. About twelve hours before the station is due to fly overhead, you’ll get a notification from NASA.
Heaven’s Above: A great website that will provide times and locations of where to look for the ISS and many more satellites that are flying over your location.
People are getting involved in this project, even if they’ve never taken a picture of the ISS previously. For example, photographer George Krieger who had never taken an image of the ISS before he heard of the #SpotTheStation project. He got right to it and on June 3 he captured two amazing ISS passes over Hollister, California. Take a look below:
The International Space Station makes two passes over Hollister California in this series of long exposure images. Credit and copyright: George Krieger.The International Space Station passes over Hollister California. Credit and copyright: George Krieger.
Here are a few more pics from our Flickr pool:
Long exposure shots of bright passes by the International Space Station over the UK on June 11, 2014. Credit and copyright: Sarah and Simon Fisher.Composite image of the June 8, 2014 ISS pass, featuring Spica, the Moon and Mars. Credit and copyright: Dave Walker.175 x 45 second exposures taken between 23:37 on June 5, 2014 and 01:53 on the 6th capturing the 23:52 and 01:28 ISS passes over London. Credit and copyright: Roger Hutchinson.
Join in and maybe you can tell all your friend that YOUR image has been sent up to the International Space Station!
And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to [email protected], and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, sign up to be a host. Send an email to the above address.
A stream of gas 2.6 million light-years long stretches in green across this picture. The insets are of galaxies in the neighborhood, while the green circle represents the Arecibo telescope beam. Credit: Rhys Taylor/Arecibo Galaxy Environment Survey/The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Collaboration
How the heck did all that gas get there? Researchers have discovered an astonishing amount of it bridging galaxies, stretching across a stream that is 2.6 million light-years across. This is more than a million light-years longer than a similar stream that was previously found in the Virgo Cluster.
“This was totally unexpected,” stated Rhys Taylor, a researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences who led the research. “We frequently see gas streams in galaxy clusters, where there are lots of galaxies close together, but to find something this long and not in a cluster is unprecedented.”
The atomic hydrogen gas is about 500 million light-years away and was spotted with the William E. Gordon Telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
Its origins are unknown, but one hypothesis postulateas that a larger galaxy passed close to smaller galaxies in the distant past, drawing out the gas as the larger galaxy moved apart again. Alternately, the large galaxy could have pushed through the group and disturbed the gas within it.
The research will be published shortly in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Artist's conception of "spacecraft/rover hybrids for the exploration of small solar system bodies", a concept funded under Phase II of NASA' Innovative Advanced Concepts program in 2014. Credit: NASA
How do crazy but neat ideas such as the Mars crane make it to space? It’s through years, sometimes decades, of development to try to solve a problem in space exploration. NASA has an entire program devoted to far-out concepts that are at least a decade from making it into space, and has just selected five projects for a second round of funding.
One of them is a robotic swarm of spacecraft that we’ve written about before on Universe Today. Flying out from a mothership, these tiny spacecraft would be able to tumble across the surface of a low-gravity moon or asteroid.
“The systematic exploration of small bodies would help unravel the origin of the solar system and its early evolution, as well as assess their astrobiological relevance,” stated its principal investigator, Stanford University’s Marco Pavone, in a 2012 story. “In addition, we can evaluate the resource potential of small bodies in view of future human missions beyond Earth.”
The concept, called “Spacecraft/Rover Hybrids for the Exploration of Small Solar System Bodies“, is among the selectees in the second phase of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program. Each will receive up to $500,000 to further develop their concept during the next two years. While Phase I studies are considered to show if a project is feasible, Phase II begins to narrow down the design.
Artist’s conception of a 10-meter sub-orbital large balloon reflector funded under NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program. Credit: NASA
“This was an extremely competitive year for NIAC Phase II candidates,” stated Jay Falker, the program’s executive at NASA Headquarters. “But the independent peer review process helped identify those that could be the most transformative, with outstanding potential for future science and exploration.”
This is the rest of the selected concepts:
10 meter Sub-Orbital Large Balloon Reflector (Christopher Walker, University of Arizona): A telescope that uses part of a balloon as a reflector. The telescope would fly high in the atmosphere, perhaps doing examinations of Earth’s atmosphere or performing telecommunications or surveillance.
Low-Mass Planar Photonic Imaging Sensor(Ben S.J. Yoo, University of California, Davis): A new way of thinking about telescopes that would use a low-mass planar photonic imaging sensor. This could be useful for missions to the outer solar system.
Orbiting Rainbows (Marco Quadrelli, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory): Using “an orbiting cloud of dust-like matter” for astronomical imaging by taking advantage of the spots where light passes through.
Have you ever heard that meme, “When looking at stars, you’re actually looking into the past. Many of the stars we see at night have already died.” Is this true?
While you’re flipping through your Pinterest collection of cat-based inspirational posters, you might come across the saying, “When looking at stars, you’re actually looking into the past. Many of the stars we see at night have already died. Like your dreams.”
Aww, that’s mean and sad. But is it true, Squidward? Are all these beautiful stars in our night sky long gone? Like our dreams?
Light travels at about 300,000 km/s, which is incredibly fast. Stars are so far away, even light from the closest stars will take years to get to us travelling at that speed. Most of the stars we see with the naked eye are actually pretty close. The brightest in the night sky is Sirius in the constellation Canis Major. It’s only about 8.6 light years away.
Which means if you crashed a whole bunch of spaceships into it tomorrow, we here on Earth wouldn’t see it happen for almost a decade. Long after people had stopped wondering where you’d picked up all those spaceships, and why had you decided to crash them into a star instead of trading for gold pressed latinum, the spice Melange, or magical space cheese.
One of the most distant naked eye stars is Deneb in the constellation Cygnus, which is almost 3,000 light years away. The light we’re seeing from Deneb started its journey towards us when ancient Rome was just a few hamlets and not even on the map for real estate speculators.
Cygnus. Credit: Stellarium
This might seem like a really long time for those of us without immortal robot bodies, but a few thousand years is negligible to the age of a typical star, which is on the order of billions of years. So, Deneb, barring removal for an interstellar bypass, is probably still there.
There are a few stars that could possibly explode in the near future, such as the red giant star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion.
It’s about 650 light years away, if it had exploded a couple centuries ago, we still wouldn’t know. There are a few galaxies that can be seen with the naked eye, such as Andromeda, which is about 2.5 million light years away. Given that Andromeda has somewhere between 200 and 400 billion stars, it is almost certain that some of them have exploded in the last 2 and a half million years. But the vast majority of them have are still there, twinkling away.
So it is possible that you could look up in the night sky and see a “dead” star, but almost all of the stars you see are perfectly active main-sequence stars, and will be for quite some time. Telescopes allow us to see much further out into space, billions of light years away. Given that a star like our Sun has a lifetime of about 10 billion years, many stars in most of the distant galaxies we observe died long ago.
This cluster is 27,000 light-years away and lies farther than the center of our galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius. Credit: NASA/ESA/I. King, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley/Wikisky.org
But don’t be sad, we’re not running out of stars. Because of this huge passage of time, it means many new stars have been born, and we just aren’t able to see them yet. There are some stars even in the most distant galaxies that are still around.
Smaller stars live longer than larger stars, and red dwarf stars can live for trillions of years. So when you look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the most distant galaxies are around 13 billion years old, and the smaller stars in those galaxies are still shining. So don’t worry. Those stars are still there, and so are your dreams.
What do you think? If you go get a closeup look and see which stars were still around, where would you go look first? Tell us in the comments below.
And if you like what you see, come check out our Patreon page and find out how you can get these videos early while helping us bring you more great content!
Huge storms on Uranus were spotted by the Keck Observatory on Aug. 5 and Aug. 6, 2014. Credit: Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley), Pat Fry (University of Wisconsin), Keck Observatory
Who can imagine Uranus as a quiet planet now? The Keck Observatory caught some spectacular pictures of the gas giant undergoing a large storm surge a few days ago, which took astronomers by surprise because the planet is well past the equinox in 2007, when the sun was highest above the equator.
“We are always anxious to see that first image of the night of any planet or satellite, as we never know what it might have in store for us,” stated Imke de Pater, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley that led the research.
“This extremely bright feature we saw on UT 6 August 2014 reminds me of a similarly bright storm we saw on Uranus’s southern hemisphere during the years leading up to and at equinox.”
Astronomers say the brightest of the storms is “monstrous” and reminds them of a dissipated feature nicknamed the “Berg”, since it looked a bit like an iceberg.
These two pictures of Uranus — one in true color (left) and the other in false color — were compiled from images returned Jan. 17, 1986, by the narrow-angle camera of Voyager 2. Image credit: NASA/JPL
The Berg, which might have been there when one of the Voyager spacecraft flew by in 1986, moved between the southern latitudes of 32 and 36 degrees between 2000 and 2005. After getting brighter in 2004, it moved towards the equator and got even stronger, where it remained until falling apart in 2009. (You can see pictures of it here.)
“The present storm is even brighter than the Berg. Its morphology is rather similar, and the team expects it may also be tied to a vortex in the deeper atmosphere,” Keck stated. Based on how bright the storm appears, researchers believe it must be reaching high into the atmosphere, perhaps approaching the tropopause (just below the stratosphere)
