Space and astronomy news
When the United States helped defeat Germany at the end of World War II, they acquired the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. He had already developed the German V2 rocket program, and went on to design all the major hardware of the US rocket program. This week, we talk about von Braun’s life and accomplishments.
Continue reading “Astronomy Cast Ep. 340: Wernher von Braun”
It’s the challenge for many a backyard observer: the Messier Marathon! And as we told you last week, with the passage of the spring equinox on March 20th means Messier Marathon season is now open. (See our article from David Dickinson with complete tips, tricks and optimal dates). But if you are hesitant to try this observing feat on your own or would rather participate from the comfort of your home, Gianluca Masi from the Virtual Telescope Project has an event just for you: an online Messier Marathon.
This will be the 6th year that the Virtual Telescope Project has on an online Messier Marathon, and they’ll be using their robotic telescopes, providing real time images — all while chatting and sharing the passion and excitement with people from around the world.
It starts on April 1, at 18.00 Universal Time. This is the perfect way to start Global Astronomy Month 2014, which is held in April every year and is the world’s largest global celebration of astronomy. Click here to join in the Marathon.
Pamela has a day job, remember? As an astronomer? Recently the 45th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference occurred in the The Woodlands, Texas. Pamela and guest astronomer Sondy Springmann will let us know about the big announcements made at this year’s conference.?
Continue reading “Astronomy Cast Ep. 341: 45th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference”
At first glance, this beautiful swirling view appears like clouds above a large body of water or possibly the eddies of ocean currents. Surprisingly, this is a desert, the Kavir desert (Dasht-e Kavir – literally ‘desert of salt-marsh’) in Iran, and the image was taken by one of the astronauts on the International Space Station.
You’ll notice the striking pattern of parallel lines and sweeping curves. NASA explains that the lack of soil and vegetation in this desert allows the geological structure of the rocks to appear quite clearly from space and the patterns result from the gentle folding of numerous, thin layers of rock. “Later erosion by wind and water cut a flat surface across the dark- and light-colored folds, not only exposing hundreds of layers but also showing the shapes of the folds. The pattern has been likened to the layers of a sliced onion,” NASA says.
While a quick look at Google Maps (see image below) shows that most of the region does appear to be sand-colored brown from space, there are regions with blue tints due to the folds and layers in the exposed surfaces, and the image is actually just a small part of the 77,600 square kilometer (30,000 sq mile) desert. It’s a bit difficult to get a sense of scale in the top image since there are no fields or roads to provide a reference, but the width of the image is about 105 kilometers (65 miles).
There is some water in this area, however. In the center of the NASA image is a dark s-shaped region is a lake and a small river snakes across the bottom of the image. The irregular, light-toned patch just left of the lake is a sand sheet thin enough to allow the underlying rock layers to be detected.
Source: NASA Earth Observatory
Could a long mission to Mars increase your risk of heart problems back on Earth? That’s something that scientists are trying to better understand after discovering that hearts become temporarily rounder in space, at least in a study of 12 astronauts.
The finding doesn’t appear to be a big surprise for cardiovascular scientists, however, who had the astronauts examine their hearts using ultrasound machines on the International Space Station as well as before and after spaceflight. The heart gets 9.4 percent more round, similar to models developed for the project, before returning to its normal shape on Earth.
“The heart doesn’t work as hard in space, which can cause a loss of muscle mass,” stated James Thomas, lead scientist for ultrasound at NASA, and senior author of the study. “That can have serious consequences after the return to Earth, so we’re looking into whether there are measures that can be taken to prevent or counteract that loss.”
Astronauts typically spend six months on the International Space Station. One year from now, NASA’s Scott Kelly and Roscomos’ Mikhail Kornienko are going to launch for a one-year mission. Spending months upon months in space leads to a host of problems upon returning to Earth. Your muscles get weaker, you’re more likely to pass out, and you’re at increased risk of bone fractures, among other problems.
A typical person on the space station spends two hours a day exercising just to ward off the worst of the effects. The researchers added that one remedy could be to add more exercises targeting the heart. This will be particularly important for missions that last 12 to 18 months or more — such as a Mars mission.
Studying astronauts in space could provide data on Earth-bound patients facing similar problems, the researchers said. Since the models that they made for astronauts were so congruent with reality, this gives the researchers confidence that they could create similar models for patients on Earth.
Conditions that could be considered include ischemic heart disease (the most common kind of heart disease and source of heart attacks), hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (thickened heart muscle) and valvular heart disease (damage to one of the heart’s valves).
Results were presented last week at the American College of Cardiology’s annual conference. It’s not immediately clear from a press release if the study was peer-reviewed. The researchers added that more study of astronauts after returning to Earth could be a useful research direction, to see how the effects persist (if at all.)
Source: American College of Cardiology
A photogenic grouping greets evening sky watchers this week providing a fine teaser leading up to a spectacular eclipse.
On the evening of Thursday, April 3rd headed into the morning of the 4th, the waxing crescent Moon crosses in front of the Hyades open star cluster. This is the V-shaped asterism that marks the head on Taurus the Bull, highlighted by the brilliant foreground star Aldebaran as the bull’s “eye”. Viewers across North America will have a ring-side seat to this “bull-fight” as the 20% illuminated Moon stampedes over several members of the Hyades in its path.
The brightest stars to be occulted are the Delta Tauri trio of stars ranging in magnitudes from +3.8 (Delta Tauri^1) to +4.8(2) and +4.3(3). Such occlusions – known in astronomy as occultations – are fun to watch, and can reveal the existence of close binary companions as they wink out behind the lunar limb. Several dozen occultations of stars brighter than +5th magnitude by the Moon happen each year, and the best events occur when the Moon is waxing and the stars disappear against its dark leading edge. We recently caught one such event last month when the Moon occulted the bright star Lambda Geminorum:
We are currently seeing the Moon cross the Hyades during every lunation until the year 2020, though it’s a particularly favorable time to catch the event in April 2014 as the Moon is a slender crescent. Notice that you can just make out the dark limb of the Moon with the naked eye? What you’re seeing is termed Earthshine, and that’s just what it is: the nighttime side of the Moon being illuminated by sunlight that is reflected off of the Earth. Standing on the Earthward side of the Moon, an observer would see a waning gibbous Earth about two degrees across. Yutu has a great view!
The Moon will cross its descending node where its apparent path intersects the ecliptic on April 1st (no joke, we swear) at 2:30 Universal Time or 10:30 PM EDT on March 31st. The next nodal crossing now occurs in just two weeks, and the Earth’s shadow will be there to greet the Moon on the morning of April 15th in the first of four total lunar eclipses that span 2014 and 2015. The month of April also sees the Moon’s orbit at its least eccentric, a time at which perigee – the Moon’s closest point to Earth – is at its most distant and apogee – its farthest point – is at its closest. This currently happens near the equinoxes, through the nodes slowly travel across the ecliptic completing one revolution every 18.6 years. Perigee can vary from 356,400 to 370,400 kilometres, and apogee can span a distance from 404,000 to 406,700 kilometres.
We’re also headed towards a “shallow year” in 2015 when the Moon has the least variability in respect to its declination. This trend will then reverse, climaxing with a “Long Nights Moon” riding high in the sky in 2025, which last occurred in 2006. The Moon will inch ever closer to Aldebaran on every successive lunation now, and begins a series of occultations of Aldebaran on January 29th, 2015 through the end of 2018. Occultations of Aldebaran always occur near these shallow years, and will be followed by a cycle of occultations of Regulus starting in 2017. We caught an excellent daytime occultation of Aldebaran by the Moon from North Pole, Alaska during the last cycle in the late 1990s.
Now for the wow factor. Our Moon is 3,474 kilometres across and located just over one light second away. The Hyades star cluster covers about 6 ½ degrees of sky – about 7 times the size of the Full Moon – but is the closest open cluster to the Earth at 153 light years distant and has a core diameter of about 18 light years across. As mentioned previous, Aldebaran isn’t physically associated with the Hyades, but is merely located in the same direction at 65 light years distant.
The Hyades star cluster also provided early 20th astronomers with an excellent study in galactic motion. At an estimated 625 million years in age, the Hyades are slowly getting disbanded and strewn about the Milky Way galaxy in a process known as evaporation. The Hyades are also part of a larger stellar incorporation known as the Taurus Moving Cluster. Moving at an average of about 43 kilometres a second, the members of the Hyades are receding from us towards a divergent point near the bright star Betelgeuse in the shoulder of Orion. 50 million years hence, the Hyades will be invisible to the naked eye as seen from Earth, looking like a non-descript open cluster and providing a much smaller target for the Moon to occult at 20’ across. Astronomer Lewis Boss was the first to plot the motion of the Hyades through space in 1908, and the cluster stands as an essential rung on the cosmic distance ladder, with agreeing measurements independently made by both Hubble and Hipparcos and soon to be refined by Gaia.
Photographing and documenting this week’s passage of our Moon across the Hyades is easy with a DSLR camera: don’t be afraid to vary those ISO and shutter speeds to get the mix of the brilliant crescent Moon, the fainter earthshine, and background stars just right. The more adventurous might want to try actually catching the numerous occultations of bright stars on video. And U.S. and Canadian west coast observers are well placed to catch the Moon cross right though the core of the Hyades… a video animation of the event is not out of the question!
And from there, the Moon heads on to its date with destiny and a fine total lunar eclipse on April 15th which favors North American longitudes. We’ll be back later this week with our complete and comprehensive eclipse guide!
When you look into the night sky, you’re seeing tremendous distances away, even with your bare eyeball. But what’s the most distant object you can see with the unaided eye? And what if you get help with a pair of binoculars, a telescope, or even with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Standing at sea level, your head is at an altitude of 2 meters, and the horizon appears to be about 3 miles, or 5 km away. We’re able to see more distant objects if they’re taller, like buildings or mountains, or when we’re higher up in the air. If you get to an altitude of 20 meters, the horizon stretches out to about 11 km. But we can see objects in space which are even more distant with the naked eye. The Moon is 385,000 km away and the Sun is a whopping 150 million km. Visible all the way down here on Earth, the most distant object in the solar system we can see, without a telescope, is Saturn at 1.5 billion km away.
In the very darkest conditions, the human eye can see stars at magnitude 6.5 or greater. Which works about to about 9,000 individual stars. Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, is 8.6 light years. The most distant bright star, Deneb, is about 1500 light years away from Earth. If someone was looking back at us, right now, they could be seeing the election of the 52nd pope, St. Hormidas, in the 6th Century.
There are even a couple of really bright stars in the 8000 light year range, that we might just barely be able to see without a telescope. If a star detonates, we can see it much further away. The famous 1006 supernova was the brightest in history, recorded in China, Japan and the Middle East.
It was a total of 7,200 light years away and was visible in the daytime. There’s even large structures we can see. Outside the galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud is 160,000 light years and the Small Magellanic Cloud is almost 200,000 light years away. Unfortunately for us up North, these are only visible from Southern Hemisphere.The most distant thing we can see with our bare eyeballs is Andromeda at 2.6 million light years, which in dark skies looks like a fuzzy blob.
If we cheat and get a little help, say with binoculars – you can see magnitude 10 – fainter stars and galaxies at more than 10 million light-years away. With a telescope you can see much, much further. A regular 8-inch telescope would let you see the brightest quasars, more than 2 billion light years away. Using gravitational lensing the amazing Hubble space telescope can see galaxies, incredibly far out, where the light had left them just hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.
If you could see in other wavelengths, you could see different distances. Fortunately for our precious radiation sensitive organs, Gamma and X rays are blocked by our atmosphere. But if you could see in that spectrum, you could see objects exploding billions of light years away. And if you could see in the radio spectrum, you’d be able to see the cosmic microwave background radiation, surrounding us in all directions and marking the edge of the observable universe.
Wouldn’t that be cool? Well, maybe we can… just a little. Turn on your television, some of the static on the screen is this very background radiation, the afterglow of the Big Bang.
What do you think? If you could see far out in the Universe what would you like a close up view of? Tell us in the comments below.
If you sit at a fairly high latitude, you may want to keep an eye out your window Tuesday (April 1) and Wednesday. A powerful X-1 class flare erupted from the sun on Saturday (March 29), sparking an active space weather forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The solar flare erupted from sunspot AR2017 and happened to be aimed at the right direction to bring material to Earth. The associated coronal mass ejections (CMEs) will send streams of particles towards our planet, which could get pulled towards the poles and cause light shows as they interact with molecules in the upper atmosphere.
“NOAA forecasters estimate a 35 percent to 60 percent chance of polar geomagnetic storms on April 1-2 when at least three CMEs are expected to deliver glancing blows to Earth’s magnetic field,” SpaceWeather.com wrote. “The best-guess forecast calls for minor G1-class storms. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.”
At the top of this story, you can view a video of the flare from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, a NASA satellite launched in 2010 to observe the sun’s activity. This not only has applications for aurora watchers, but also for those people concerned about the effect CMEs have on Earth’s satellites, power lines and other sensitive infrastructure.
Below is an older picture from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a joint NASA and European Space Agency mission that also keeps an eye on solar activity. The sun has an 11-year cycle of solar activity, and you can see peak year 2001 at the front of the image along with quieter years 1996 and 2006 near the back. The year 2014 is just off the peak for this solar cycle.
If you catch a light show, be sure to post it on the Universe Today Flickr pool, and we may include it in a future story!
The five-year-old in me is really excited at picturing rovers in a sandbox. While piloting these machines around simulated Mars terrain has its own inherent joy, it’s also a valuable tool for planners trying to figure out how to get the rovers rolling on the Red Planet.
ExoMars is heading that way in 2018, prompting the European Space Agency and Airbus to renovate a “Mars yard” to test out different design ideas, which they highlighted in an event last week that Universe Today was unable to attend.
The real rover will never see this yard — ESA wants to make sure the machine is pristine for launch — but the simulated terrain will come in handy when controllers want to simulate rover movements on the Red Planet during the mission. Simultaneously, the team showcased a rover prototype called “Bryan.”
A press release for ESA mentioned that the yard had been upgraded, but the agency did not respond to a Universe Today e-mail request asking what those upgrades are or how much they cost. Previous press releases about the facility said that it was eight meters by eight meters (26 feet by 26 feet) in size, while current ones say that the facility is 30 meters by 13 meters (100 feet by 43 feet).
Also last week, ESA held workshops considering where to land the rover. You can view more information about the selection process at this ESA site, but below are a couple of interesting paragraphs from the site:
“ExoMars 2018 has two science elements. A rover will investigate the local geology and search for signs of past and present life while a surface platform will study the Martian environment. The landing site must be a geologically diverse site that is ancient, and shows the strong potential for once having been habitable,” ESA stated.
“For ancient, read older than 3.6 billion years. Potentially habitable in this context means that there must be abundant evidence that water was once present for extended periods or was frequently recurring at the site. It must also be safe for landing. No safe landing, no science.”
You can read more about ExoMars at this website.
Source: European Space Agency
CAPE CANAVERAL AIR FORCE STATION, FL – The sudden and unexpected outage of a crucial tracking radar that is mandatory to insure public safety, has forced the scrub of a pair of launches planned for this week from Cape Canaveral, FL, that are vital to US National Security, United Launch Alliance, SpaceX and NASA.
The tracking radar is an absolutely essential asset for the Eastern Range that oversees all launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the Kennedy Space Center on the Florida Space Coast.
The pair of liftoffs for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and SpaceX/NASA had been slated just days apart on March 25 and March 30.
Urgent repairs are in progress.
Both launches have now been postponed for a minimum of 3 weeks, according to a statement I received from the 45th Space Wing of the US Air Force that controls the critical launch control systems, communications, computers and radar elements.
An Atlas V rocket carrying the super secret NROL-67 intelligence gathering spy satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office and a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon cargo freightor bound for the International Space Station (ISS) were both in the midst of the final stages of intensive pre-launch processing activities this week.
The Eastern range radar was apparently knocked out by a fire on March 24, a short time after the early morning rollout of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket to the launch pad at Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral.
“An investigation revealed a tracking radar experienced an electrical short, overheating the unit and rendering it inoperable,” according to today’s explanatory statement from the USAF 45th Space Wing.
“The outage resulted in an inability to meet minimum public safety requirements needed for flight, so the launch was postponed.”
A SpaceX spokesperson likewise confirmed to me that their launch was also on hold.
A fully functional tracking radar is an absolute requirement to ensure the success and safety of any launch.
The range radar must also be functioning perfectly in order to destroy the rocket in a split second in the event it veers off course to the nearby heavily populated areas along the Space Coast.
Myself and other space journalists had been working at Pad 41 on March 24 and setting up our remote cameras to capture spectacular up close views of the blastoff that had then been scheduled for March 25.
Insufficient maintenance and antiquated equipment due to a lack of US government funding and investment in infrastructure may be implicated.
The range outage for such an extended period of time reveals a clear vulnerability in US National Security planning.
The Air Force is also looking into the feasibility of reviving an inactive radar as a short term quick fix.
But in order to use the retired backup system, it will also have to re-validated to ensure utility and that all launch control and public safety requirements are fully met.
Simultaneously, the engineering team is recalculating launch trajectories and range requirements.
Such a revalidation process will also require an unknown period of time.
The full impact of putting these two launches on hold for the NRO and SpaceX is not known at this time.
Furthermore, the USAF will need to determine the downstream scheduling impact on the very busy manifest of all of the remaining launches throughout 2014 – averaging more than one per month.
Neither the NRO nor NASA and SpaceX have announced firm new launch dates.
The earliest possible Atlas V launch date appears to be sometime in mid-April, but that assessment can change on a dime.
In the meantime, personnel from the 45th Space Wing will continue to work diligently to repair the range radar equipment as quickly as possible.
ULA engineers also rolled the Atlas V rocket back to its processing hanger until a new launch target date is set.
SpaceX likewise awaits a target launch date for the Dragon CRS-3 cargo mission packed with some 5000 pounds of science experiments and supplies for the six man station crew.
It seems likely that the next Orbital Sciences Antares/Cygnus launch to the ISS will also have to be postponed since Dragon and Cygnus berth at the same station port.
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Atlas V NROL 67, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, commercial space, Orion, Chang’e-3, LADEE, Mars rover, MAVEN, MOM 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. Also at the Quality Inn Kennedy Space Center, Titusville, FL, March 29.