Universe Today

February 25, 2014December 23, 2015 by Elizabeth Howell

Pushy Black Holes Stop Elliptical Galaxies From Forming Stars

Multi-wavelength view of the elliptical galaxy NGC 5044. Credit: Digitised Sky Survey/NASA Chandra/Southern Observatory for Astrophysical Research/Very Large Array (Robert Dunn et al. 2010)

Contradicting past theories, cold gas has been found in abundance in some elliptical galaxies — showing that there must be some other explanation why these types of galaxies don’t form new stars. Astronomers believe that the jets from supermassive black holes in these galaxies’ center must push around the gas and prevent stars from forming.

Researchers spotted the gas for the first time using old data from the recently retired Herschel space observatory, which was able to peer well into the infrared — where it spotted carbon ions and oxygen atoms. This find stands against the previous belief that these galaxies were “red and dead”, referring to their physical appearance and the fact that they form no new stars.

“We looked at eight giant elliptical galaxies that nobody had looked at with Herschel before and we were delighted to find that, contrary to previous belief, six out of eight abound with cold gas”, stated Norbert Werner, a researcher at Stanford University in California who led the study.

“These galaxies are red, but with the giant black holes pumping in their hearts, they are definitely not dead,” added Werner.

NGC 1399, an elliptical galaxy about 65 million light years from Earth. Credit: NASA, Chandra

Previously, scientists thought that the galaxies got rid of their cold gas or had used it all up during a burst of earlier star formation. With cold gas found in the majority of the sample, researchers then used other observatories to try to find warmer gas up to tens of millions of Kelvin (or Fahrenheit or Celsius).

X-ray information from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory revealed that there is hot gas cooling in six of the eight galaxies, but not in the remaining two of the sample.

“This is consistent with theoretical expectations: once cooled, the hot gas would become the warm and cold gas that are observed at longer wavelengths. However, in these galaxies the cooling process somehow stopped, and the cold gas failed to condense and form stars,” the European Space Agency stated.

“While the six galaxies with plenty of cold gas harbour moderately active black holes at their centres,” ESA added, “the other two show a marked difference. In the two galaxies without cold gas, the central black holes are accreting matter at frenzied pace, as confirmed by radio observations showing powerful jets of highly energetic particles that stem from their cores.”

You can read more about the research in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society or in preprint version on Arxiv.

Source: European Space Agency

February 25, 2014December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

New Technique Finds Water in Exoplanet Atmospheres

Artist's concept of a hot Jupiter exoplanet orbiting a star similar to tau Boötes (Image used with permission of David Aguilar, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

As more and more exoplanets are identified and confirmed by various observational methods, the still-elusive “holy grail” is the discovery of a truly Earthlike world… one of the hallmarks of which is the presence of liquid water. And while it’s true that water has been identified in the thick atmospheres of “hot Jupiter” exoplanets before, a new technique has now been used to spot its spectral signature in yet another giant world outside our solar system — potentially paving the way for even more such discoveries.

Researchers from Caltech, Penn State University, the Naval Research Laboratory, the University of Arizona, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have teamed up in an NSF-funded project to develop a new way to identify the presence of water in exoplanet atmospheres.

Previous methods relied on specific instances such as when the exoplanets — at this point all “hot Jupiters,” gaseous planets that orbit closely to their host stars — were in the process of transiting their stars as viewed from Earth.

This, unfortunately, is not the case for many extrasolar planets… especially ones that were not (or will not be) discovered by the transiting method used by observatories like Kepler.

Watch: Kepler’s Universe: More Planets in Our Galaxy Than Stars

So the researchers turned to another method of detecting exoplanets: radial velocity, or RV. This technique uses visible light to watch the motion of a star for the ever-so-slight wobble created by the gravitational “tug” of an orbiting planet. Doppler shifts in the star’s light indicate motion one way or another, similar to how the Doppler effect raises and lowers the pitch of a car’s horn as it passes by.

The two Keck 10-meter domes atop Mauna Kea. (Rick Peterson/WMKO)

But instead of using visible wavelengths, the team dove into the infrared spectrum and, using the Near Infrared Echelle Spectrograph (NIRSPEC) at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, determined the orbit of the relatively nearby hot Jupiter tau Boötis b… and in the process used its spectroscopy to identify water molecules in its sky.

“The information we get from the spectrograph is like listening to an orchestra performance; you hear all of the music together, but if you listen carefully, you can pick out a trumpet or a violin or a cello, and you know that those instruments are present,” said Alexandra Lockwood, graduate student at Caltech and first author of the study. “With the telescope, you see all of the light together, but the spectrograph allows you to pick out different pieces; like this wavelength of light means that there is sodium, or this one means that there’s water.”

Previous observations of tau Boötis b with the VLT in Chile had identified carbon monoxide as well as cooler high-altitude temperatures in its atmosphere.

Now, with this proven IR RV technique, the atmospheres of exoplanets that don’t happen to cross in front of their stars from our point of view can also be scrutinized for the presence of water, as well as other interesting compounds.

“We now are applying our effective new infrared technique to several other non-transiting planets orbiting stars near the Sun,” said Chad Bender, a research associate in the Penn State Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and a co-author of the paper. “These planets are much closer to us than the nearest transiting planets, but largely have been ignored by astronomers because directly measuring their atmospheres with previously existing techniques was difficult or impossible.”

Once the next generation of high-powered telescopes are up and running — like the James Webb Space Telescope, slated to launch in 2018 — even smaller and more distant exoplanets can be observed with the IR method… perhaps helping to make the groundbreaking discovery of a planet like ours.

“While the current state of the technique cannot detect earthlike planets around stars like the Sun, with Keck it should soon be possible to study the atmospheres of the so-called ‘super-Earth’ planets being discovered around nearby low-mass stars, many of which do not transit,” said Caltech professor of cosmochemistry and planetary sciences Geoffrey Blake. “Future telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will enable us to examine much cooler planets that are more distant from their host stars and where liquid water is more likely to exist.”

The findings are described in a paper published in the February 24, 2014 online version of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Sources: Caltech and EurekAlert press releases.

February 25, 2014December 23, 2015 by Elizabeth Howell

Yesterday’s Mammoth Solar Flare Is The Biggest Of 2014 So Far

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured these images of a large flare erupting from the sun Feb. 21, 2014. Credit: NASA/SDO

She’s a rainbow! You can see the first moments of a huge flare belching off the sun in the picture above. The so-called X-class flare erupted a few hours ago (at 7:25 p.m. EST Feb. 24, or 12:25 a.m. UTC Feb. 25) and was captured by several spacecraft. If you have a pictures of the sun yourself to share, feel free to post them in the Universe Today Flickr pool.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory saw the flare growing in at least six different wavelengths of light, which are visible in the image above. This is classified this as an X4.9-class flare, which shows that it is pretty strong. X-flares are the most powerful kind that the sun emits, and each X number is supposed to be twice as intense as the previous one (so an X-2 flare is twice as powerful as X-1, for example).

SpaceWeather.com says this is the most powerful flare of the year so far, emitted from sunspot AR1967 (or more properly speaking, AR1990; sunspots are renamed if they survive a full rotation of the sun, as this one has done twice already!) While solar flares can lead to auroras, in this case it appears the blast was pointed in the wrong direction, the site added.

“Although this flare is impressive, its effects are mitigated by the location of the blast site–near the sun’s southeastern limb, and not facing Earth,” SpaceWeather stated. “Indeed, a bright coronal mass ejection (CME) which raced away from the sun shortly after the flare appears set to miss our planet.”

This image from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory illustrates increased solar activity between Feb. 18-20, 2014. Credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO/GSFC

The sun goes through an 11-year cycle of sunspot and solar activity, which is supposed to be at its peak right now. This particular peak has been very muted, but lately things have been picking up. The European Space Agency noted that between Feb. 18 and 20, the sun sent out six CMEs in three days, with most of them moving in different directions.

“This level of activity is consistent with what we might expect as the Sun is near its maximum period of activity in the 11-year solar cycle,” ESA stated.

You can see the sun changing on this SDO page, showing the latest views of the sun in different wavelengths. And for more information on sunspots, check out this NASA page explaining a little more about how they work.

February 25, 2014December 29, 2015 by Susie Murph

Carnival of Space #342

Carnival of Space. Image by Jason Major.

The tent is up! This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Pamela Hoffman at the Everyday Spacer blog.

Click here to read Carnival of Space #342.

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.

February 24, 2014December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Watch Saturn Slip Behind the Moon

Occultation of Saturn on Feb. 22, 2014 by Colin Legg

Or, more accurately, watch the Moon pass in front of Saturn. Either way you get the same result: a beautiful video of planetary motion in action!

On the morning of Saturday, Feb. 22, the Moon drifted in front of the planet Saturn from the point of view of certain locations on Earth. Luckily one of those locations was Perth, Australia, where astrophotographer Colin Legg happens to be, and thus we all get to enjoy the fantastic results of his photographic and astronomical acumen.

Check out the video below:

The occultation — as such events are called whenever one celestial object passes in front of, or “hides,” another (the root of the word means “to conceal”) — may make it look like a tiny Saturn is getting absorbed by a giant Moon. But (obviously) they are separated by a vast distance: at the time of the occultation, 9.658 AU, or about 1,444,816,000 kilometers (897.7 million miles).

These sort of events will become a bit more common as the Moon is “headed towards a ‘shallow’ year in 2015 relative to the ecliptic; it will then begin to slowly open back up and ride high around 2025,” according to a recent Universe Today article by David Dickinson.

For those of you interested, Colin lists his equipment as a Celestron C8, f/10, prime focus. His camera is a Canon 5D2, running Magic Lantern RAW video firmware in 3x crop mode @ 1880 x 1056 resolution. Footage was taken at 1/60 sec exposure, ISO 200, 10 fps.

See more of Colin’s work on his Facebook page here.

February 24, 2014April 26, 2016 by David Dickinson

Watch the Moon Meet Venus in the Dawn this Wednesday

The view of Wednesday's conjunction from selected sites based on four separate continents. Credit: Created by the author using Stellarium.

Are you ready for some lunar versus planetary occultation action? One of the best events for 2014 occurs early this Wednesday morning on February 26^th, when the waning crescent Moon — sometimes referred to as a decrescent Moon — meets up with a brilliant Venus in the dawn sky. This will be a showcase event for the ongoing 2014 dawn apparition of Venus that we wrote about recently.

This is one of 16 occultations of a planet by our Moon for 2014, which will hide every naked eye classical planet except Jupiter and only one of two involving Venus this year.

An occultation occurs when one celestial body passes in front of another, obscuring it from our line of sight. The term is used to refer to planets or asteroids blocking out distant stars or the Moon passing in front of stars or planets.

Wednesday’s event has a central conjunction time of 5:00 Universal. Viewers in northwestern Africa based in Mali and southern Algeria and surrounding nations will see the occultation occur in the dawn sky before sunrise, while viewers eastward across the Horn of Africa, the southern Arabian peninsula, India and southeast Asia will see the occultation occur in the daylight.

A comparison of Venus versus the Moon in the daytime taken by Sharin Ahmad (@shahgazer) from Malaysia during the last lunation on January 29th, 2014.

Observers worldwide, including those based in Australia, Europe and the Americas will see a near miss, but early risers will still be rewarded with a brilliant dawn pairing of the second and third brightest objects in the night sky. This will also be a fine time to attempt to spot Venus in the daytime, using the nearby crescent Moon as a guide. It’s easier than you might think! In fact, Venus is actually brighter than the Moon per apparent square arc second of surface area, owing to its higher average reflectivity (known as albedo) of 80% versus the Moon’s dusky 14%.

The International Occultation Timing Association also maintains a chart of ingress and egress times for specific locations along the track of the occultation.

Credit: Created using Occult 4.0.11. — The footprint of the Wednesday occultation of Venus by the Moon. Solid lines indicate where the occultation occurs before sunrise, while the dashed area denotes where the occultation occurs after sunrise. Credit: Created using Occult 4.1.0.11.

The Moon occults Venus 21 times in this decade. The last occultation of Venus by the Moon occurred on September 8^th, 2013, and the next occurs October 23rd 2014 over the South Pacific in daylight skies very close to the Sun, and is unobservable.

Wednesday’s event also offers a unique opportunity to catch a crescent Venus emerging from behind the dark limb of the Moon. On Wednesday, Venus presents a 34” diameter disk that is 35% illuminated and shining at magnitude -4.3, while the Moon is a 12% illuminated crescent three days from New. Fun fact: February 2014 is missing a New Moon, meaning that both January and March will each contain two!

Apparent path of Venus in relation to the Moon Wednesday morning as seen from a theoretical geocentric (Earth-centered) location. Created using Starry Night Education software.

This also means that a well positioned observer in northwestern Africa would be able to see able to catch the dark limb of Venus creeping out from behind the nighttime side of the Moon against a dark sky. Such favorable occurrences only happen a handful of times per decade, and this week would be a great time to try and briefly spot – or perhaps even video or photograph – a phenomenon know as the ashen light of Venus as the dazzling crescent daytime side of the planet lay obscured by the Moon. Is this effect reported by observers over the years a fanciful illusion, or a real occurrence?

Perhaps, due to the remote location, this chance to spy and record this elusive effect will go unnoticed this time ‘round. The next chance with optimal possibilities to catch a crescent Venus occulted by the Moon against a dark sky occurs next year on October 8th, 2015, favoring the Australian outback. Anyone out there down for an observing expedition to prove or disprove the ashen light of Venus once and for all? Astronomy road trip!

Photo by Author — April 22nd, 2009 conjunction of Venus and the Moon as seen from Hudson, Florida. The Photo by author.

This event also provides optimal circumstances as Venus heads towards greatest elongation west of the Sun on March 22^nd and the Moon-Venus pair lay 43 degrees west of the Sun during Wednesday’s event. Compare this to the impossible to observe occultation this October, when the pairing is only one degree east of the Sun! The next occultation of Venus for North America occurs next year on December 7th, 2015 and will be visible in the daytime across the extent of the track except for Alaska and Northwestern Canada.

Vexillographers may also want to take note: this week’s Venus-Moon pairing will closely emulate the familiar crescent Moon plus star pairing seen on many national flags worldwide. Did an ancient and unrecorded occultation of Venus by the Moon inspire this meme? Tradition has it that Sultan Alp Arslan settled on the star and crescent for the flag of the Turks after witnessing a close conjunction after the defeat of the Byzantine Army at the Battle of Manzikert on August 26^th, 1071 A.D. This tale, however, is almost certainly apocryphal, as no occultations of planets or bright stars by the Moon occurred on or near that date, and only two occultations of Venus by the Moon occurred that year. And Venus was less than two degrees from the Sun on that date, yet another strike against it. In fact, the only occultations of Venus by the Moon in 1071 occurred on June 29^th and November 27^th. Perhaps Arslan just took a while to decide…

Still, this week’s event provides a great photo-op to have “Fun with Flags” and capture the pair behind your favorite astronomical conjunction-depicting banner. And be sure to send those pics into Universe Today… methinks there’s a good chance of us running a post occultation photo-essay later this week!

February 24, 2014December 23, 2015 by Elizabeth Howell

‘Green Valley’ Of Galaxies Shows Off Gas And Star Formation

M33, the Triangulum Spiral Galaxy, seen here in a 4.3 hour exposure image. Astronomers used JWST to examine a section of its south spiral arm to search out and find nearly 800 newly forming stars. Credit and copyright: John Chumack.

We keep saying this: the universe is more complex than it appears. Conventional thinking in galaxy research postulates that spiral galaxies have star-forming areas, while ellipticals do not due to a lack of gas. While this thinking has been debunked, there’s now emerging research showing a “green valley” of galaxies somewhat in between these two types.

Basically, the research (which includes participation from citizen scientists in the Galaxy Zoo project) is showing that there are two different populations of “green” galaxies, between ellipticals and spirals. Further, what happens to star formation based upon gas in the area.

“In this paper, we take a look at the most crucial event in the life of a galaxy: the end of star formation. We often call this process ‘quenching’ and many astrophysicists have slightly different definitions of quenching. Galaxies are the place where cosmic gas condenses and, if it gets cold and dense enough, turns into stars. The resulting stars are what we really see as traditional optical astronomers,” wrote Kevin Schawinski, a Ph.D. student at the University of Oxford who is on the Galaxy Zoo team, in a blog post.

“Not all stars shine the same way though: stars much more massive than our sun are very bright and shine in a blue light as they are very hot. They’re also very short-lived. Lower mass stars take a more leisurely pace and don’t shine as bright (they’re not as hot). This is why star-forming galaxies are blue, and quiescent galaxies (or ‘quenched’ galaxies) are red: once star formation stops, the bluest stars die first and aren’t replaced with new ones, so they leave behind only the longer-lived red stars for us to observe as the galaxy passively evolves.”

You can read more information in the blog post. The study, which has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is available on preprint site Arxiv.

February 24, 2014December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Watch a Car-Sized Asteroid Slam Into the Moon

An image of the flash resulting from the impact of a large meteorite on the lunar surface on 11 September 2013, obtained with the MIDAS observatory. Credit: J. Madiedo / MIDAS

Hey, all you astro-photographers/videographers out there: were you shooting the Moon back on September 11, 2013? You may want to review your footage and see if you captured a bright flash which occurred at about 20:07 GMT. Astronomers say a meteorite with the mass of a small car slammed into the Moon at that time and the impact produced a bright flash, and it even would have been easy to spot from the Earth.

According to astronomers Jose M. Madiedo, from the University of Huelva and Jose L. Ortiz, from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia both in Spain, this impact was the longest and brightest confirmed lunar impact flash ever observed, as the “afterglow” of the impact remained visible for 8 seconds.

The astronomers think the bright flash was produced by an impactor of around 400 kg with a width of between 0.6 and 1.4 meters. The rock hit may have hit Mare Nubium at about 61,000 kilometers per hour (38,000 miles per hour) — although the uncertainty of the impact is fairly high, the team says in their paper. But if it is as high as they think, it may have created a new crater with a diameter of around 40 meters. The impact energy was equivalent to an explosion of roughly 15 tons of TNT.

This beats the previous largest impact seen – which occurred just six months earlier in March 2013 – which was estimated to pack as much punch as 5 tons of TNT. Astronomers that explosion was caused by a 40 kg meteoroid measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide, traveling about 90,000 km/hr (56,000 mph.)

How often does an asteroid hit the Moon? Astronomers actually aren’t very sure.

On average, 33 metric tons (73,000 lbs) of meteoroids hit Earth every day, the vast majority of which harmlessly ablates or burns up high in Earth’s atmosphere, never making it to the ground. The Moon, however, has little or no atmosphere, so meteoroids have nothing to stop them from striking the surface.

The lunar impact rate is so uncertain because observations for objects in the mass range of visible impacts from Earth are quite few. But now, astronomers have set up networks of telescopes that can detect them automatically. NASA has the Automated Lunar and Meteor Observatory (ALaMO) at Marshall Space Flight Center, and the Spanish telescopes are part of the Moon Impacts Detection and Analysis System (MIDAS) system.

Lunar meteors hit the ground with so much kinetic energy that they don’t require an oxygen atmosphere to create a visible explosion. The flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site.

This thermal glow can be detected from Earth as short-duration flashes through telescopes. Generally, these flashes last just a fraction of a second. But the flash detected on September 11, 2013 was much more intense and longer than anything observed before.

Mosaic of zoomed images showing the flash evolution from the Sept. 11, 2013 impact during the first 2 seconds. Time increases from left to right in each row, starting from the upper left. The time interval between two consecutive images in the same row is 0.1 s. Credit: Madiedo, Ortiz, et al. 2014.

“Our telescopes will continue observing the Moon as our meteor cameras monitor the Earth’s atmosphere,” said Madiedo and Ortiz in a press release. “In this way we expect to identify clusters of rocks that could give rise to common impact events on both planetary bodies. We also want to find out where the impacting bodies come from.”

You can read the team’s paper here.

February 24, 2014December 23, 2015 by Elizabeth Howell

Chelyabinsk ‘Was A Pretty Nasty Event’ And Is Spurring Asteroid Action

Chelyabinsk fireball recorded by a dashcam from Kamensk-Uralsky north of Chelyabinsk where it was still dawn. A study of the area near this meteor air burst revealed similar signatures to the Tall el_Hammam site.

Looking at the power of the Chelyabinsk meteor (which struck a year ago and is visible starting around 1:15 in the video above) is still terrifying all these months later. Happily for those of on Earth worried about these big space rocks, the world’s space agencies are taking the threat seriously and are starting to implement new tracking systems to look out for more threatening space rocks.

“It was a pretty nasty event. Luckily, no one was killed but it just shows the sort of force that these things have,” said Alan Harris, senior scientist of the DLR Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, in this new European Space Agency video.

An asteroid that is only about 100 meters (328 feet) in diameter, for example, “could actually completely destroy an urban area in the worst case. So those are the things we’re really looking out for and trying to find ways to tackle.”

Check out the video for some examples of how the Europeans are talking about dealing with this problem, including a fun comparison to cosmic billiards and a more serious discussion on how to shove these rocks aside if they were on a collision course with our planet.

For more information on tracking down killer asteroids, check out this past video with Universe Today founder Fraser Cain.

February 24, 2014December 23, 2015 by Elizabeth Howell

Apollo 11 Play Aims To Showcase Landing To Teenagers And Inspire Space Love

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin plant the US flag on the Lunar Surface during 1st human moonwalk in history 45 years ago on July 20, 1969 during Apollo 1l mission. Credit: NASA

A big challenge of making history “real” to students is finding a way to make it identifiable. Back in the early days of space exploration, it seemed every launch was on TV and every step to the moon extensively documented on radio, television and other media of the day. In an age where we just pull what we want off of social media and YouTube, the sense of excitement must be hard to convey to younger students.

To bring the inspiration of Apollo 11 to a younger audience, one high school teacher in Maryland took it upon himself to write a play for secondary school students — including much of the original transcript, right down to the “nouns” and “verbs” of the computers the astronauts used.

Richard Zmuda, who teaches in Annapolis, first came up with the idea three years ago after giving a National Honor Society speech to high schoolers where he cited alumni to the students, such as Apollo 11 lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin.

“I had researched Aldrin for the speech and learned some fascinating details about him personally and about the mission in general,” Zmuda stated. “I realized that, while as a young boy I was able to watch on television Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, none of the students could even remotely share in that experience. Yet it was one of the most important events in the history of mankind.”

Buzz Aldrin's bootprint on the surface of the moon during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. Credit: NASA — Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint on the surface of the moon during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. Credit: NASA

The result is a remarkably accurate adaptation of the mission transcript, and one that would be an interesting challenge for young thespians to bring to the stage. There are actual lines of dialog that sound close to what an astronaut of the day would say, such as “Your Co-Elliptic Sequence Initiation Time of Ignition: 125:19:3470.” Teaching the students how to convey a sense of drama, while staying true to the script, would be a fun exercise. It also would require some research so that the students understand what they’re talking about, which is likely the point that Zmuda wanted to convey.

That’s not to say that every line of dialog is that technical. Zmuda works to bring out the drama in several parts of the mission, including how Aldrin initially missed his first test “jump” back on to the lunar ladder and banged his shins against a rung. The staged Aldrin exclaims to the audience, “Well, at least I can say I was the first person to actually PEE on the moon,” something the real person never came close to saying. In a dramatic sense, however — especially given the age of the audience — this was a fun way to show how serious the situation could have been if Aldrin had more trouble getting back up.

Apollo 11 Mission image - Lunar Module at Tranquility Base — Apollo 11 Mission image – Lunar Module at Tranquility Base

Even more interesting is Zmuda’s decision to keep the actors to between four and seven people — three astronauts and either a single person as CapCom in Mission Control, or three people representing the different shifts. This focuses the bulk of the attention on the astronauts, although “Houston” is intended to act as a dramatic foil during the frequent communications blackouts (which did happen in the real mission, too). It also makes it easy for a small drama class to stage the play.

The Apollo 11 adaptation is a fun read for space geeks, and likely is a good tool for teaching history at the high school level and above. Although the script is very technical at times, teaching students how to read this material can be equated to learning how to understand Shakespeare, or to deliver foreign words on stage. It’s a great effort by Zmuda, and hopefully will teach a few students about what the landing represented to space exploration.