Hubble Space Telescope image of the El Gordo galaxy cluster. This and other gigantic galaxy clusters are challenging the most common theory of the evolution of structure in the Universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Jee (University of California, Davis)
The Hubble Space Telescope has a new calculation for the huge El Gordo galaxy cluster: 3 million billion times the mass of the Sun. This is even 43 per cent more massive than past estimates that examined the complex in X-rays, NASA stated.
“A fraction of this mass is locked up in several hundred galaxies that inhabit the cluster and a larger fraction is in hot gas that fills the entire volume of the cluster. The rest is tied up in dark matter, an invisible form of matter that makes up the bulk of the mass of the universe,” the Space Telescope Science Institute stated.
“Though galaxy clusters as massive are found in the nearby universe, such as the so-called Bullet Cluster, nothing like this has ever been seen to exist so far back in time, when the universe was roughly half of its current age of 13.8 billion years. The team suspects such monsters are rare in the early universe, based on current cosmological models.”
An intriguing signal could be due to "dark matter annihilations" pops up on the left of this data gathered by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The image on left shows the galactic center in gamma rays with energies between 1 and 3.16 GeV. Red indicates the most activity, and the labels are for pulsars. The image at right has all these gamma-ray sources removed. Credit: T. Linden, Univ. of Chicago
Sometimes a strange signal comes from the dark and it takes a while to figure out what that signal means. In this case, scientists analyzing high-energy gamma rays emanating from the galaxy’s center found an unexplained source of emission that they say is “consistent with some forms of dark matter.”
The data came courtesy of NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and was analyzed by a group of independent scientists. They found that by removing all known sources of gamma rays, they were left with gamma-ray emissions that so far, they cannot explain. More observations will be needed to characterize these emissions, they cautioned.
Also, the location of the radiation at the galaxy’s center is an interesting spot, since scientists believe that’s where dark matter would lurk since the insofar invisible substance would be the base of normal structures like galaxies.
“The new maps allow us to analyze the excess and test whether more conventional explanations, such as the presence of undiscovered pulsars or cosmic-ray collisions on gas clouds, can account for it,” stated Dan Hooper, an astrophysicist at Fermilab and lead author of the study.
“The signal we find cannot be explained by currently proposed alternatives and is in close agreement with the predictions of very simple dark matter models.”
The scientists suggest that if WIMPs were destroying each other, this would be “a remarkable fit” for a dark matter signal. They again caution, though, that there could be other explanations for the phenomenon.
“Dark matter in this mass range can be probed by direct detection and by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), so if this is dark matter, we’re already learning about its interactions from the lack of detection so far,” stated co-author Tracy Slatyer, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“This is a very exciting signal, and while the case is not yet closed, in the future we might well look back and say this was where we saw dark matter annihilation for the first time.”
Climate change is now affecting every continent and ocean says the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international collaboration of more than 2,500 experts. If we don’t act soon to bring greenhouse gas emissions under control, the problems will only grow substantially worse. This isn’t a casual statement from a few fringe scientists: nearly 500 people had to sign off on the exact wording of the summary, including 66 expert authors, 271 officials from 115 countries, and 57 observers.
The report is the second of three installments of the IPCC’s fifth assessment of climate change. The first installment, released last year, covered the physical science of climate change. It stated with certainty that climate change is very real and that we are the cause. The new report focuses on the impacts of climate change and how to adapt to them. The third installment, which will come out in April, will focus on cutting greenhouse emissions.
Ice in the Arctic is collapsing, the oceans are rising, coral reefs are dying, fresh water supplies are diminishing, and the oceans are becoming more acidic, which is killing certain creatures and stunting the growth of others. Heat waves and heavy rains are escalating, food crops are being damaged, disease is spreading, human beings will be displaced due to flooding, animals are migrating toward the poles or going extinct, and the worst is yet to come.
The evidence the world is warming is indubitable.
And yet climate change deniers are still represented the world over. Most notably, the Heartland Institute weighed in on the report by focusing on the benefits of climate change. The group’s take on the matter reads like a crude April Fool’s joke.
A Wall Street Journal op-ed by Matt Ridley has also gained quite a bit of attention. An article in Climate Science Watch refers to his piece as “a laundry list of IPCC misrepresentations.” Ridley fails to cite the data presented in the latest report and even tries to claim that global warming will have net benefits.
From the sweeping opinion articles to the simple comments posted below online articles, the IPCC report is being tragically misinterpreted. One need only take a quick glance at the data to see that the world is warming and catastrophic effects are already occurring.
Climate change is global. It will not only affect the poorest nations but the world. “Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” said Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC in a news conference presenting the report.
Yes this report is sobering. But it also provides an opportunity. We have the power, the intelligence, and the moral duty to protect our home planet. We cannot reverse the damage. We might not even be able to stop it. But we can minimize it. There is still time.
We can act across all scales — local to global — to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But first we must learn to adapt to a changing environment. Many governments are well past the state of acknowledging climate change and are in fact starting to find solutions.
“I think that dealing effectively with climate change is just going to be something great nations do,” said Christopher Field, co-chairman of the working group that wrote the report and an earth scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford.
The state of New York recently ordered an electric utility serving Manhattan and its surrounding suburbs, to spend $1 billion upgrading its system to prevent future damage from flooding and other weather disruptions. In a reaction to the blackouts caused by Hurricane Sandy and the acceptance that more extreme weather is to come, the company will raise flood walls, bury vital equipment and determine whether or not emerging climate risks will demand different actions.
Utility regulators across the States are discussing whether to follow New York’s lead.
While greenhouse gas emissions have begun to decline slightly in many countries, including the United States, those gains are being swamped by emissions from other countries such as China and India. We must make greater efforts to adapt or the warming planet will be inevitable.
“There is no question that we live in a world already altered by climate change,” said Field. The time for action is now.
The successful liftoff of Sentinel-1A in April 2014. Credit: ESA-S.Corvaja, 2014
And we have liftoff — two times over! Launch fans got a double treat yesterday when two space missions successfully left Earth. First came a morning launch at 10:46 a.m. Eastern (2:46 p.m. UTC) when DMSP-19 (a satellite of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program) took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. You can watch the replay below the jump.
“The satellite launched today is equipped with a sophisticated sensor suite that can capture visible and infrared cloud cover; measure precipitation, surface temperature and soil moisture; and collect specialized global meteorological, oceanographic and solar-geophysical information in all weather conditions. DMSP-19 joins six other satellites in polar orbit providing weather information,” stated Lockheed Martin, the long-standing prime contractor of the program.
And just above this paragraph is the French Guiana launch of Sentinel-1A, the first half of a pair of environmental monitoring satellites that should show the Earth in high-definition to the European Space Agency and customers. Then below the jump you can see the successful separation of Sentinel-1A in space. The launch took place at 5:02 p.m. Eastern (9:02 p.m. UTC).
You can enter NASA’s ‘Take the Plunge’ contest and guess LADEE’s impending lunar impact date, expected on or before April 21, 2014. Credit: NASA
You can enter NASA’s ‘Take the Plunge’ contest and guess LADEE’s impending lunar impact date, expected on or before April 21, 2014. Credit: NASA Contest entry details below – deadline soon[/caption]
When will LADEE hit the Moon for its looming end of mission finale?
NASA’s resoundingly successful LADEE lunar dust exploring mission is nearly out of gas – and needs your help, now!
With its inevitable doom approaching, NASA needs you to summon your thoughts and is challenging you to participate in a ‘Take the Plunge’ contest – figuratively not literally – and guess LADEE’s impending impact date.
LADEE, which stand for Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, will smack violently into the Moon and scatter into zillions of bits and pieces sometime in the next two and a half weeks, on or before about April 21.
But exactly when will it impact the lunar surface? NASA wants to hear your best guess!
The ‘Take the Plunge’ contest was announced by NASA today, April 4, at a media briefing.
This dissolve animation compares the LRO image (geometrically corrected) of LADEE captured on Jan 14, 2014 with a computer-generated and labeled image of LADEE . LRO and LADEE are both NASA science spacecraft currently in orbit around the Moon. Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University
Between now and its inevitable doom, mission controllers will command LADEE to continue gathering groundbreaking science.
And it will do so at an even lower attitude that it orbits today by firing its orbit maneuvering thrusters tonight and this weekend.
The couch sized probe seeks to eek out every last smidgeon of data about the Moons ultra tenuous dust and atmospheric environment from an ultra low altitude just a few miles (km) above the pockmarked lunar surface.
But because the moon’s gravity field is so uneven, the probes thrusters must be frequently fired to keep it on course and prevent premature crashes.
“The moon’s gravity field is so lumpy, and the terrain is so highly variable with crater ridges and valleys that frequent maneuvers are required or the LADEE spacecraft will impact the moon’s surface,” said Butler Hine, LADEE project manager at Ames.
“Even if we perform all maneuvers perfectly, there’s still a chance LADEE could impact the moon sometime before April 21, which is when we expect LADEE’s orbit to naturally decay after using all the fuel onboard.”
LADEE will fly as low as fly approximately 1 to 2 miles (2 to 3 kilometers) above the surface.
Everyone of all ages is eligible to enter NASA’s “Take the Plunge: LADEE Impact Challenge.”
The submissions deadline is 3 p.m. PDT Friday, April 11.
NASA says that winners post impact. They will receive a commemorative, personalized certificate from the LADEE program via email.
Series of LADEE star tracker images features the lunar terrain. Credit: NASA Ames
Watch for my upcoming story on LADEE’s science accomplishments and what’s planned for her final days.
LADEE was launched on Sept. 6, 2013 from NASA Wallops in Virginia on a science mission to investigate the composition and properties of the Moon’s pristine and extremely tenuous atmosphere, or exosphere, and untangle the mysteries of its lofted lunar dust dating back to the Apollo Moon landing era.
Launch of NASA’s LADEE lunar orbiter on Friday night Sept. 6, at 11:27 p.m. EDT on the maiden flight of the Minotaur V rocket from NASA Wallops, Virginia, viewing site 2 miles away. Antares rocket launch pad at left. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com
The science mission duration had initially been planned to last approximately 100 days and finish with a final impact on the Moon on about March 24th.
NASA granted LADEE a month long extension since the residual rocket fuel is more than anticipated due to the expertise of LADEE’s navigation engineers and the precision of the launch atop the Orbital Sciences Minotaur V rocket and orbital insertion.
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing LADEE, Chang’e-3, Orion, Orbital Sciences, SpaceX, commercial space, Mars rover and more planetary and human spaceflight news.
Learn more at Ken’s upcoming presentations at the NEAF astro/space convention, NY on April 12/13 and at Washington Crossing State Park, NJ on April 6.
Full scale model of NASA’s LADEE lunar orbiter on display at the free visitor center at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com
Jets of icy particles bursting from Saturn's moon Enceladus are shown in this Cassini image taken on November 2005. Credit: NASA/ESA/ASI.
Ever since the Cassini spacecraft first spied water vapor and ice spewing from fractures in Enceladus’ frozen surface in 2005, scientists have hypothesized that a large reservoir of water lies beneath that icy surface, possibly fueling the plumes. Now, gravity measurements gathered by Cassini have confirmed that this enticing moon of Saturn does in fact harbor a large subsurface ocean near its south pole.
“For the first time, we have used a geophysical method to determine the internal structure of Enceladus, and the data suggest that indeed there is a large, possibly regional ocean about 50 kilometers below the surface of the south pole,” says David Stevenson from Caltech, a coauthor on a paper on the finding, published in the current issue of the journal Science. “This then provides one possible story to explain why water is gushing out of these fractures we see at the south pole.”
Artist’s impression of the possible interior of Enceladus based on Cassini’s gravity investigation. The data suggest an ice outer shell and a low-density, rocky core with a regional water ocean sandwiched between at high southern latitudes. Cassini images were used to depict the surface geology in this artwork. The mission discovered plumes of ice and water vapour jetting from fractures – nicknamed ‘tiger stripes’ – at the moon’s south pole in 2005. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
On three separate flybys in 2010 and 2012, the spacecraft passed within 100 km of Enceladus, twice over the southern hemisphere and once over the northern hemisphere.
During the flybys, the gravitational tug altered a spacecraft’s flight path ever so slightly, changing its velocity by just 0.2–0.3 millimeters per second.
As small as these deviations were, they were detectable in the spacecraft’s radio signals as they were beamed back to Earth, providing a measurement of how the gravity of Enceladus varied along the spacecraft’s orbit. These measurements could then be used to infer the distribution of mass inside the moon.
For example, a higher-than-average gravity ‘anomaly’ might suggest the presence of a mountain, while a lower-than-average reading implies a mass deficit.
On Enceladus, the scientists measured a negative mass anomaly at the surface of the south pole, accompanied by a positive one some 30-40 km below.
“By analyzing the spacecraft’s motion in this way, and taking into account the topography of the moon we see with Cassini’s cameras, we are given a window into the internal structure of Enceladus,” said lead author Luciano Iess.
“This is really the only way to learn about internal structure from remote sensing,” Stevenson added.
The only way to get more precise measurements would be to put seismometers on Enceladus’s surface. And that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
Stevenson said the key feature in the gravity data was the negative mass anomaly at Enceladus’s south pole. This happens when there is less mass in a particular location than would be expected in the case of a uniform spherical body. Since there is a known depression in the surface of Enceladus’s south pole, the scientists expected to find a negative mass anomaly. However, the anomaly was quite a bit smaller than would be predicted by the depression alone.
“The perturbations in the spacecraft’s motion can be most simply explained by the moon having an asymmetric internal structure, such that an ice shell overlies liquid water at a depth of around 30–40 km in the southern hemisphere,” Iess said.
While the gravity data cannot rule out a global ocean, a regional sea extending from the south pole to 50 degrees S latitude is most consistent with the moon’s topography and high local temperatures observed around the fractures – called ‘tiger stripes’ at Enceladus south pole.
Many have said Enceladus is one of the best places in the Solar System to look for life. Noted scientist Carolyn Porco and Chris McKay have a recent paper out titled, “Follow the Plume: The Habitability of Enceladus,” where they say that since analysis of the plume by the Cassini mission indicates that the “steady plume derives from a subsurface liquid water reservoir that contains organic carbon, biologically available nitrogen, redox energy sources, and inorganic salts” that samples from the plume jetting out into space are accessible with a low-cost flyby mission. “No other world has such well-studied indications of habitable conditions.”
These latest findings by Cassini make a mission to Enceladus even more enticing.
Coming to you on April 8th courtesy of the Virtual Telescope!
Mars attacks and comes to a night sky near you this month, and the folks at the Virtual Telescope Project and Slooh are bringing it to you live and in color. Unlike most planets, “Mars viewing season” comes around only once about every two years. And while Mars is shining bright in the sky right now, the “official” event of Mars being closest to Earth happens next week on April 8th, when the Red Planet reaches opposition and shines at magnitude -1.5 in the constellation Virgo.
We’ve written about the prospects and circumstances for viewing Mars this opposition season; now it’s time to watch it live. The webcast starts at 23:00 Universal Time (UT) or / 7:00 PM EDT on the night of Tuesday April 8th, and will feature real-time images brought to you via robotic telescopes worldwide. Hosted by astrophysicist Gianluca Masi and run in conjunction with Astronomers Without Borders, this online observing session of Mars also occurs during Global Astronomy Month. Anyone who tuned in for their recent online Messier Marathon and live broadcasts of several recent Near-Earth Asteroids past our fair planet knows that they’re in for quite a treat!
Want more? Or simply want dual screen live views of “all Mars, all the time?” Our dependable friends over at Slooh will be chronicling the Mars opposition on the same night, starting at a slightly different bat-time at 02:00 UT (the morning of the 9th) which is 10:00 PM EDT the evening of the 8th. Slooh will be presenting a live feed from its automated telescopes based in the Canary Islands off of the coast of West Africa and will feature live commentary from hosts Paul Cox and astronomer and author of The Sun’s Heartbeat Bob Berman.
“Mars has held disproportionate focus for humans since ancient times,” Berman said in a recent press release. “It is neither the closest planet, nor the largest, nor the most detailed through telescopes. Nonetheless, it is the only planet in the universe that shows distinct and sometimes detailed surface features through our telescopes. It is also the most Earthlike body in the known universe, with oxygen bound into its soil and water contained in its ices. Therefore, during the brief two weeks when it comes near us every 26 months, it deserves the limelight.”
Indeed, Mars has captivated observers ever since Christiaan Huygens sketched the first blurry surface feature Syrtis Major back in 1659. Percival Lowell enthralled the public imagination with his sketches of what he thought were canals built by an intelligent and ancient civilization on the Red Planet, and astronomer David Peck Todd once proposed to signal said Martians via balloon aloft in 1909. The SETI Institute’s Seth Shostak noted in his book Confessions of an Alien Hunter that to the average person on the street in the early 20th century, the idea that Mars was inhabited was a given.
Of course, the reality revealed to us by the early Mariner missions in the 1960s onwards paints a bleak picture of a cratered world with a tenuous atmosphere inhospitable to life as we know it.
Still, Mars is a real world, somewhere that rovers are rolling across and exploring even as we peer at it though the eyepiece this month. Six months prior to opposition also the best opportunity to send spacecraft to Mars, and later this year, NASA’s MAVEN and India’s Mars orbiter Mangalyaan both launched in late 2013 will complete the trip.
Mars approaches Earth during the month of April. Credit: Efrain Morales Rivera/Jaicoa Observatory/Aguadilla, Puerto Rico.
Observing the Red Planet through the eyepiece is easy. The most conspicuous feature is the white northern pole cap, currently tipped towards us. Orographic clouds have also been imaged by amateurs recently over the Hellas basin, and a planet wide dust storm could always crop up at any time. A Martian day is only 37 minutes longer than the Earth’s, meaning you’re only seeing Mars rotated by about 15 degrees of longitude if you observe it at the same time each night. At about 15” across, you could stack 120 Mars diameters as seen this week from Earth across a Full Moon. And no, Mars NEVER appears as big as a Full Moon as seen from the Earth, not this week, every August, or EVER, despite those pesky chain-emails from well meaning co-workers/friends/relatives who just know that you’re into that “space thing…”
All oppositions of Mars are not created equal. In fact, we’re coming off of a series of lackluster oppositions that’ll see Mars getting successively better until 2018, when it’ll nearly top the historic opposition of 2003. For ephemerides buffs, Mars reaches opposition — that is, it’s 180 degrees opposite to the Sun as reckoned in right ascension — on April 8th at 21:00 UT/5:00 PM EDT. It is not quite, however, at its closest to us for 2014: it has still got 0.003 AU (465,000 kilometres, a little over the distance from the Earth to the Moon) and just over 5 days before its closest approach to Earth on the night of April 14th/15th, when a total eclipse of the Moon lies just nine degrees away. The reason opposition and the closest approach of Mars to Earth are not quite in sync is because the orbits of both planets are elliptical, and while Mars is currently moving towards perihelion, Earth is heading toward aphelion on July 4th.
A photo-montage leading up to the 2003 opposition. Photos by author using a webcam turned planetcam.
Can’t wait until the 8th? Universe Today hosts a Virtual Star Party every Sunday evening at 11:00 PM EDT / 03:00 UT on Google+ featuring telescopes and commentary by observers and astronomers worldwide. Weather willing, Mars should be a centerpiece object for the show this Sunday night on April 6th.
Be sure to check out Mars at its best this week for 2014, either in a sky near you or online… hey, maybe we’ll be live casting the transit of Earth, the Moon and Phobos someday from Mars on the slopes of Elysium Mons on November 10th, 2084:
Let’s see, hopefully they’ll have perfected that whole Futurama “head in a jar” thing by then…
Just in case you aren’t already in French Guiana, here’s your chance to watch a European environment radar satellite take a rocket ride. Tune into the webcast above to see Sentinel-1A’s launch. If the schedule holds, the launch will be at 5:02 p.m. EDT (9:02 p.m. UTC) on April 3, 2014. Watch live above!
ESA heralds Sentinel-1 as a “new era in Earth observation” because the satellite duo (yes, it will be eventually two satellites) will vastly improve their ability to send out information on natural disasters and quick-moving Earth observation events. Sentinel-1 will in fact be the first of a satellite series feeding into the same information system.
Once the second half of the duo launches in 2016, Sentinel-1 will have a wide swath of geographical coverage, could go to the same areas quickly, and would send data out quickly. Repeatable and rapid Earth observations will bring data quickly into the hands of the authorities who could make decisions about evacuations and other things.
This information will be fed into Copernicus, a new system that will co-ordinate all of the Sentinel satellites for users to gain information.
“The Sentinels will provide a unique set of observations, starting with the all-weather, day and night radar images from Sentinel-1 to be used for land and ocean services,” ESA stated in an explanation about Copernicus.
“Sentinel-2 will deliver high-resolution optical images for land services and Sentinel-3 will provide data for services relevant to the ocean and land. Sentinel-4 and Sentinel-5 will provide data for atmospheric composition monitoring from geostationary and polar orbits, respectively.”
And here are a few of the other applications ESA foresees it would be useful for: sea-ice measurements, looking for oil spills, tracking ships, flagging land with “motion risks” and also doing mapping for the forestry industry.
As far as the webcast, there’s a schedule of speeches and events beforehand at the European Space Agency’s space operations center in Darmstadt, Germany. Be sure to tune in a bit earlier at 3:30 p.m. EST (7:30 p.m. UTC) to see the ceremonies.
A multiple frame picture of the rock falling, taken from a video taken during a skydive in 2012. Credit and copyright: Anders Helstrup, used by permission.
It sounds like a remarkable story, almost unbelievable: Anders Helstrup went skydiving nearly two years ago in Hedmark, Norway and while he didn’t realize it at the time, when he reviewed the footage taken by two cameras fixed to his helmet during the dive, he saw a rock plummet past him. He took it to experts and they realized he had captured a meteorite falling during its “dark flight” — when it has been slowed by atmospheric braking, and has cooled and is no longer luminous.
Respected Norwegian astrophysicist Pål Brekke confirmed to Universe Today that the story is true and the video is authentic. “I was part of the investigation – and kept secret for two years – in hope of finding the meteorite,” Brekke said via a conversation on Twitter.
Since the search for the meteorite has come up empty so far, Helstrup’s story and video has been released in an effort to recruit more people to look for the rock — and to confirm that this actually was a meteorite.
“It has been a little hard to keep it as a secret,” Helstrup told Universe Today via email, “but everyone has been loyal to the project and helped us out!”
Here’s the video:
The rock zooms by at about :15 in this video:
You can watch a slower version in the video below.
Helstrup has been searching with friends, family and volunteers after getting advice from experts from the Geological Museum in Oslo, Norwegian Space Centre and Norwegian meteor network, making painstaking efforts to pinpoint the location of where the meteorite fell.
“The meteorite has for sure some possible hiding spots,” Helstrup said. “There is a forest with lots of different places it can easily disappear. Even if there is several areas where it would be found easily, there is a river, some marshy spots and areas and lots of high grass. Therefore the best chance of a finding would be in springtime. But we have high hopes!”
Finding the rock would provide the definitive confirmation it really was a space rock that Helstrup captured on film. There’s been much debate about the veracity of both the video and the claim (read Phil Plait’s look at the evidence) but in fact, it is Helstrup who might be most skeptical this was a meteor. There are experts, however, who say there is no doubt.
“It can’t be anything else,” said geologist Hans Amundsen, quoted in the Norwegian publication NRK. “The shape is typical of meteorites – a fresh fracture surface on one side, while the other side is rounded.”
He added that the meteorite may have been part of a larger rock that had exploded perhaps 20 kilometers above Helstrup.
What if the rock would have hit Helstrup or his diving partner? Amundson said the rock would have cut him in half.
“Imagine a 5 kilo rock hitting you in the chest at 300 kilometers per hour,” Amundson says in the video. “That would have led to quite an accident investigation.”
This is unique because — if confirmed — this is the first time a meteor in dark flight has been captured on film.
“Fireballs entering the atmosphere have been filmed many times,” says Morten Bilet in the video. Bilet is a meteorite expert. “This is unique because it was filmed during its so called “dark flight” – after it has been burned out. That’s never been done before so this is something new and exciting.”
We’ve asked Helstrup to keep us posted on any developments in this story or if the meteorite is found.
One of the first pictures released from UrtheCast in April 2014 showed several hundred square miles around Moneague, Jamaica. Credit: UrtheCast
UrtheCast — the company aiming to bring high-definition pictures of Earth to the public — is among the exemptions after NASA severed most ties officially with Russia yesterday (April 2), the company said in a press release.
“It is business as usual for the company, as we continue the commissioning of our cameras on the International Space Station,” stated Wade Larson, UrtheCast President and chief operating officer.
“The ISS has long enjoyed a privileged position in international diplomacy and has survived unscathed during multiple international crises in recent years. In fact, we understand that the ISS has been nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. I think that says a lot.”
The news came around the same time that UrtheCast revealed its first pictures from its two cameras, which were installed by Russian spacewalkers in January following a failed attempt in December.
The new pictures reveal a few hundred square miles of Moneague, Jamaica and Santa Cruz de Mara, Venezuela, both taken on March 28.
“This is a pivotal moment for the company and for everyone who’s been a part of the vision that we set in motion in the fall of 2010. Our team has been working extremely hard to make certain that we reach this goal of democratizing a very powerful perspective on the planet,” stated Scott Larson, UrtheCast co-founder and chief executive officer.
The company is promising there will soon be a “near realtime” stream of Earth observations from the cameras’ perch on the International Space Station. Read more about the company’s plans in this past Universe Today story.
Following a leaked memo early yesterday, NASA released an official statement saying that it would sever most ties with Russia except for those related to International Space Station operations. The United States is among several countries condemning Russia’s decision to bring troops to Crimea a few weeks ago. The decision will likely affect several planetary science agreements with Russia, planetary scientist Barbara Cohen said on Twitter after the news was released.
