Curiosity’s View Past Tall Dune at edge of ‘Dingo Gap’ This photomosaic from Curiosity’s Navigation Camera (Navcam) taken at the edge of the entrance to the Dingo Gap shows a 3 foot (1 meter) tall dune and valley terrain beyond to the west, all dramatically back dropped by eroded rim of Gale Crater. View from the rover’s current position on Sol 528 (Jan. 30, 2014). The rover team may decide soon whether Curiosity will bridge the dune gap as a smoother path to next science destination. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer- kenkremer.com
“Red Rover, Red Rover, I’m looking right over… this sand dune on Mars,” said the Curiosity rover on Twitter, as well as quoting photographer Ansel Adams, “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”
This new interactive image put together by panoramacist Andrew Bodrov using the latest imagery from Curiosity allows you to nearly join the rover on Mars as it looks down across a sand dune and into the “Dingo Gap” area and the valley beyond.
The rover team is considering driving across and through this meter high sand sand dune to reach their desired science destinations instead of going over terrain with sharp rocks which might poke more holes in the rover’s aluminum wheels.
Thanks to Andrew Bodrov for sharing this new interactive image, which were taken with the rover’s 34-millimeter Mast Camera. The mosaic, which stretches about 30,000 pixels width, includes 101 images taken on Sol 530 (Feb 1, 2014 here on Earth.)
A part of the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy is dazzling in this new view from NASA's Great Observatories. The Small Magellanic Cloud, or SMC, is a small galaxy about 200,000 light-years way that orbits our own Milky Way spiral galaxy. Credit: NASA.
If you love talking about space — and as a reader of Universe Today, I really hope you do — there’s an awesome podcast for you to add to your playlist. 365 Days of Astronomy puts out an astronomy-themed episode every single day of the year, covering everything from recent discoveries, to folklore, to community events.
If you’ve got a microphone and a desire to contribute, or have at least some coffee money to contribute to charity, they’d really love to hear from you as they enter a sixth (sixth!) year of operation. More details are below the jump.
Full disclosure here: Universe Today is a big supporter of 365 Days of Astronomy, and I’ve been contributing podcasts myself since last year. It is an awesome experience. Pamela Gay (who oversees the project through her astronomy education organization, Cosmoquest) is inspiring to work for as she is a tireless supporter of bringing the joy of space to the general public.
Nancy Atkinson (a fellow contributor and UT senior editor) joked to me today, “It’s kind of like the Mars rovers — the Energizer Bunny of podcasts.” And it’s through your support that we can keep going, and going, and going. Here’s the official press release with information about contributions:
365 Days of Astronomy will continue its service in 2014! This time we will have more days available for new audio. Have something to share? We’re looking for content from 10 minutes long up to an hour! Since 2009, 365 Days of Astronomy has brought a new podcast every day to astronomy lovers around the world to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy. Fortunately, the project has continued until now and we will keep going for another year in 2014. This means we will continue to serve you for a 6th year.
Through these years, 365 Days Of Astronomy has been delivering daily podcasts discussing various topics in the constantly changing realm of astronomy. These include history of astronomy, the latest news, observing tips and topics on how the fundamental knowledge in astronomy has changed our paradigms of the world. We’ve also asked people to talk about the things that inspired them, and to even share their own stories, both of life doing astronomy and science fiction that got them imagining a more scientific future.
365 Days of Astronomy is a community podcast that relies on a network of dedicated podcasters across the globe who are willing to share their knowledge and experiences in astronomy with the world and it will continue that way. In 2013, 365 Days of Astronomy started a new initiative with CosmoQuest. We now offer great new audio every weekend, while on weekdays we serve up interesting podcasts from CosmoQuest and other dedicated partners. We also have several monthly podcasts from dedicated podcasters and have started two new series: Space Stories and Space Scoop. The former is a series of science fiction tales, and the latter is an astronomy news segment for children.
From the universe to the solar system, we’ve had an interesting journey, especially the ostensibly legendary comet ISON which finally ended its days by breaking apart and vaporizing. We hope we won’t end like ISON did! As for 2014, we will have more available days for new podcasts.
A widefield view of Comet ISON, taken from New Mexico Skies at 11h 59m UT using an FSQ 106 ED telescope and STL11K camera on a PME II mount. 1 x 10 min exposures. Credit and copyright: Joseph Brimacombe.
For this upcoming year, the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast is looking for individuals, organizations, schools, companies, and clubs to sign-up for their 5 – 60 minutes of audio for the new daily podcast which will be aired on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. As for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we will air audio podcasts from CosmoQuest and partners’ Google+ hangouts. We’ll also post the matching video submissions on our YouTube Channel.
We will once again continue our quest in the podcasting arena, but we need your support to be a success. The project is now accepting financial support from individuals as well as organizations to cover our audio engineering and website support costs. The podcast team invites people and organizations to sponsor shows by donating to support one day of the podcast. It costs us about $45 per show. For your donation of $30, a dedication message will be announced in the beginning of the show. For a $15 donation a sponsorship message will be heard at the end of the show. Alternatively, for a $100 donation a sponsor may request a dedication message at the end of a whole week of programs. These donations are essential to cover the price for editing and posting podcasts.
The 365 Days of Astronomy podcast is heard by 5,000 listeners per day and by 2013 we have surpassed 6,8 million downloads. In 2009, the project was awarded a Parsec Award as “The Best Infotainment” podcast and a year later, in 2010-2012, it was nominated for the “Best Fact Behind the Fiction” award.
When stars die, their final gasps can trigger the most powerful blasts of energy in the universe. Their demise can also lead to a bizarre death dance as the voracious corpse of a dead star begins consuming a nearby companion.
Today (Feb. 5) you can watch a live webcast (or watch the replay later) to learn about the recent detection of a dying star igniting the most powerful blast ever seen – something so powerful it radiated energy that was nearly 50 billion times that of visible light. Also learn how scientists have discovered that a familiar sight in the skies is actually our earliest view yet of a star being consumed by the remnant of a nearby exploded star.
The webcast starts at 19:00 UTC (3 pm EDT, Noon PDT). You can watch below. To submit questions ahead of time or during the webcast, send an email to [email protected] or post on Twitter with hashtag #KavliLive. You can find additional information from the Kavli Foundation here.
A fresh impact crater is seen in this image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 19, 2013. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
The great thing about the longevity of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is that we can see changes taking place on the Red Planet, such as this relatively new and rather large impact crater. This image shows a stunning 30-meter-wide crater with a rayed blast zone and far-flung secondary material surrounding. Scientists say the impact and resulting explosion threw debris as far as 15 kilometers in distance.
Before and after pictures of this region show the new impact crater formed between July 2010 and May 2012.
The image has been enhanced in false color and so the fresh crater appears blue because of the lack of reddish dust that covers most of Mars’ surface.
With MRO’s help, scientists have been able to estimate that Mars gets pummeled with about 200 impacts per year, but most are much smaller than this new one.
The usual procedure for finding new craters is that MRO’s Context Camera, or CTX, or cameras on other orbiters identify anomalies or dark spots that appear in new images and then MRO’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera is targeted to follow up by imaging those dark spots in greater detail.
Dr. Andrea Ghez has spent much of her career studying the region right around the center of the Milky Way, including its supermassive black hole. In fact, she helped discover it in the first place. Dr. Ghez speaks about this amazing and dynamic region.
“Hi, I’m Dr. Andrea Ghez, and I’m a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA. I study the center of our galaxy. The original objective was to figure out if there’s a supermassive black hole there, and in doing this, we’ve actually uncovered more questions than answers.”
What are you looking for at the center of the galaxy?
“We are tremendously privileged to be able to study the center of the galaxy, and have this exquisite laboratory to play with, to get insight into the fundamental physics of black holes, and also their astrophysical role in the formation and evolution of galaxies. You can also ask what kinds of phenomena do you expect to see around a black hole, and we have a lot of predictions about our thoughts about how galaxies form and evolve, and our ideas suggest that there’s a feedback between the galaxy and the black hole. But many of these models predict things that we simply don’t see, which again provides yet another playground.”
What’s it like around the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy?
“If you could get into a spaceship and get right down to the black hole, it would be a very busy place. Stars would be zooming around, like the sun, but you’d have a very busy day. You wouldn’t survive – I guess that would be another problem! You’d get torn apart. It’s just a very extreme place. The analogy that often gets made with the center of the galaxy is that it’s like the urban downtown, and we live out in the suburbs, so we live in a very calm place whereas the center of the galaxy is a a very extreme place, in almost every way you can describe an environment.”
What are some of the discoveries?
Stars at the Galactic Center. Credit: Astronomy Image Gallery
“The observations at the center of the Milky Way have taught us that one, it’s really normal to have a black hole at the center of the galaxy. I mean, our galaxy is completely ordinary, garden-variety, nothing-special-about-us, so if we have one, presumably every galaxy harbors a supermassive black hole at it’s center. We’ve also learned that the idea that a supermassive black hole should be surrounded by a very dense concentration of very old stars is not true. And that prediction is often used in other galaxies to find their black holes, because we can’t do the kinds of experiments we’ve done at the center of our own – that you look for this concentration of light, but in our galaxy we’re not seeing that, so you have a case where’s there’s absolutely clearly a supermassive black hole, yet you don’t see this collection of old stars. That’s a puzzle.
“Another puzzle that we’ve found that’s illuminating our ideas about other galaxies is that people predicted that you shouldn’t see young stars being formed near a black hole. In fact, in the early 1980’s, when people recognized that there were young stars found in the vicinity of a black hole, that was used to argue that perhaps you couldn’t possibly have a black hole because of these young stars. And yet again, we have a supermassive black hole – we know it, and those young stars are still exist, and we’ve even found stars even closer. And it’s the tidal forces that make it even more difficult to understand why the young stars should be there. The tidal forces pull the gases apart, and for star formation, you need a very fragile balls of gas and dust to collapse, so something’s amiss.”
How might those young stars get formed?
“There are so many ideas about how young stars could form at the center of the galaxy, but the one that has the most support is the idea that, at the time that these stars were being formed, that there was a much denser concentration of gas than there is today, and in that denser concentration you can get the collapse of those little clouds. We think that because as we continue to study the orbits of those stars, and what we’ve seen is that those orbits outside a certain distance start to fall into an ordered plane, like the planets orbiting the sun. We see a substantial fraction of them having a common orbital plane, and that looks very reminiscent to the solar system. The same way the planets formed out of a gas disc in the early days, that’s the same idea that is being invoked for these young stars, on a very different scale.”
While exoplanets make the news on an almost daily basis, one of the biggest announcements occurred in 2012 when astronomers claimed the discovery of an Earth-like planet circling our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri B, a mere 4.3 light-years away. That’s almost close enough to touch.
Of course such a discovery has led to a heated debate over the last three years. While most astronomers remain skeptical of this planet’s presence and astronomers continue to study this system, computer simulations from 2008 actually showed the possibility of 11 Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri B.
Now, recent research suggests that five of these computer-simulated planets have a high potential for photosynthetic life.
The 2008 study calculated the likely number of planets around Alpha Centauri B by assuming an initial protoplanetary disk populated with 400 – 900 rocks, or protoplanets, roughly the size of the Moon. They then tracked the disk over the course of 200 million years through n-body simulations — models of how objects gravitationally interact with one another over time — in order to determine the total number of planets that would form from the disk.
While the number and type of exoplanets depended heavily on the initial conditions given to the protoplanetary disk, the eight computer simulations predicted the formation of 21 planets, 11 of which resided within the habitable zone of the star.
A second team of astronomers, led by Dr. Antolin Gonzalez of the Universidad Central de Las Villas in Cuba, took these computer simulations one step further by assessing the likelihood these planets are habitable or even contain photosynthetic life.
The team used multiple measures that asses the potential for life. The Earth Similarity index “is a multi-parameter first assessment of Earth-likeness for extrasolar planets,” Dr. Gonzalez told Universe Today. It predicts (on a scale from zero to one with zero meaning no similarity and one being identical to Earth) how Earth-like a planet is based on its surface temperature, escape velocity, mean radius and bulk density.
Planets with an Earth Similar index from 0.8 – 1 are considered capable of hosting life similar to Earth’s. As an example Mars has an Earth Similar index in the range of 0.6 – 0.8. It is thus too low to support life today.
However, the Earth Similarity index alone is not an objective measure of habitability, Gonzalez said. It assumes the Earth is the only planet capable of supporting life. The team also relied on the P model for biological productivity, which takes into account the planet’s surface temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide present.
At this point in time “there is no way to predict, at least approximately, the partial pressure of carbon dioxide with the known data, or the variations from a planet to another,” Gonzalez said. Instead “we assumed a constant partial pressure of carbon dioxide for all planets simplifying the model to a function of temperature.”
Gonzalez’s team found that of the 11 computer-simulated planets in the habitable zone, five planets are prone for photosynthetic life. Their Earth Similarity index values are 0.92, 0.93, 0.87, 0.91 and 0.86. If we take into account their corresponding P model values we find that two of them have better conditions than Earth for life.
According to this highly theoretical paper: if there are planets circling our nearest neighbor, they’re likely to be teeming with life. It’s important to note that while these indexes may prove to be very valuable years down the road (when we have a handful of Earth-like planets to study), we are currently only looking for life as we know it.
The paper has been published in the Cuban journal: Revista Cubana de Fisica and is available for download here. For more information on Alpha Centauri Bb please read a paper available here published in the Astrophysical Journal.
The Soyuz-U rocket sits ready for launch at the baikonur Cosmodrome earlier today. Credit: The Russian Space Agency.
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The first launch of February 2014 worldwide is about to light up the night skies over the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, with the launch of a Soyuz-U rocket carrying the uncrewed Progress M-22M spacecraft to the ISS. You can watch the launch live here, as well as the “fast-track” docking just 5 hours and 58 minutes later.
Progress will be carrying 2.8 tons of fuel, oxygen, supplies and experiments to the International Space Station. This will be the 54th Progress flight to the International Space Station since the first Progress launch to the station in 2000.
The launch is set to occur at 16:23:33 Universal Time or 11:23:33 AM EST. NASA TV will go live with the launch at 11:00 AM EST/16:00 UT, and TV Tsenki will also broadcast video from the pad just prior, though the broadcast frequently its sans audio.
Progress is also on a four orbit “fast-track” launch headed to the International Space Station. Tune in to NASA TV at 5:00 PM EST/22:00 UT later today, and you’ll be able to catch the docking of the Progress spacecraft to the Pirs module of the ISS as well. Docking is set to occur at 5:25 PM EST/22:25 UT over the North Atlantic Ocean.
Fun fact: Neil Armstrong still holds the record for the fastest journey from liftoff to docking at 5 hours and 33 minutes during Gemini 8 way back in 1966.
Update: ISS Astros indeed report during the live broadcast of the launch of Progress M-22M on NASA TV today of catching sight of the first stage of the Soyuz-U at liftoff… we’ll post any pics if and when they surface.
Progress M-20M undocked from the same Pirs compartment earlier this week on Monday in order to make way for the arrival of Progress M-22M. Progress M-20M is still in orbit, and is slated for a fiery destructive reentry on February 11th over the South Pacific. The long span between undocking and reentry for Progress M-20M allows for experiments on the spacecraft’s attitude control system to be carried out by ground controllers.
…and LIFTOFF of the Soyuz-U rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome with Progress M-22M! Credit: NASA TV.
This also marks the start of a busy 2014 season at the International Space Station. On March 1st, SpaceX continues its contract to resupply the station with the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket with its fifth Dragon capsule making its third operational delivery to the station on CRS-3. Then later in March on the 12th, Expedition 38 crewmembers Oleg Kotov, Sergey Ryazansky, and NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins will return to Earth aboard Soyuz TMA-10M. The next crewed launch headed to the International Space Station are Expedition 39 cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov, Oleg Artemyev, and NASA astronaut Steve Swanson launching from Baikonur on March 26th on Soyuz TMA-12M.
Progress M-22M is ultimately slated to undock from the Pirs module of the International Space Station on April 7th for a destructive reentry over the South Pacific. Three additional SpaceX launches utilizing Dragon capsules and two more launches of Orbital Science’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft will be conducted in 2014, as well as visits by the European Space Agency’s ATV-5 Georges Lemaitre in June and JAXA’s HTV-5 in July.
And another launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome is coming right up on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, with the liftoff of an International Launch Services Proton rocket carrying the Turksat 4A satellite. The launch will be carried live via the ILS website and is slated for 21:09 UT/4:09 PM EST.
And though these are all standard resupply missions to the International Space Station, spaceflight is anything but routine. Avid trackers of live launches will remember the Progress M-12M spacecraft that was lost shortly after launch back in August 2011. To date, Progress M-12M was the only supply craft that failed to reach the International Space Station. Progress M-12M impacted in the Choisk Region of Russia’s Altai Republic in the Far East. The RD-0110 engine began to experience a flight anomaly just over five minutes after launch, causing the flight computer to execute a termination of thrust. Progress M-12M was the first loss of a Progress spacecraft since the start of the program in 1978. Ironically, Progress M-12M carried among its cargo manifest 10 paintings made by the son of Russian artist Alesandr Shilov said to be for “the psychological support of the crew…” There’s also a small cottage industry in Siberia east of Russian launch sites in salvaging rocket parts and boosters for scrap metal as they plummet from the sky.
Tonight’s passage of Progress M-20M and the International Space Station over the US SE and the Caribbean region. Created by the author using Orbitron.
It’s also possible to spot these spacecraft from your backyard as they arrive and depart from the International Space Station. We caught sight of Progress M-20M just last night, passing very near the waxing crescent Moon. Progress was about magnitude +1 when directly overhead, and was about 9 minutes ahead of the International Space Station. We’ve seen the Dragon, HTV, ATV spacecraft, as well as the U.S. Space Shuttle shortly after undocking from the International Space Station when it was in service. In fact, there’s a series of good passes of the ISS at dusk over the next few evenings for the southeastern United States, including a pass at ~6:58 PM EST tonight. Progress M-20M should be about 20 minutes ahead of the station at this point, assuming, of course, it hasn’t maneuvered in its orbit as a part of ongoing thruster control experiments.
We’ll be checking those final orbital corrections just prior to the pass tonight, as well as tracking the launch and docking of Progress M-22M. Follow us on Twitter (@Astroguyz) for further updates.
Be sure to catch all the action at Baikonur and in low Earth orbit today, both online and overhead!
Itokawa, a peanut-shaped asteroid that has different densities in its small body. Credit: ESO/JAXA
From directly inferring the inside of an asteroid for the first time, astronomers have discovered these space rocks can have strange variations in density. The observations of Itokawa — which you may remember from the Japanese Hayabusa mission that landed on the asteroid in 2005 — not only teach us more about how asteroids came to be, but could help protect Earth against stray space rocks in the future, the researchers said.
“This is the first time we have ever been able to to determine what it is like inside an asteroid,” stated Stephen Lowry, a University of Kent scientist who led the research. “We can see that Itokawa has a highly varied structure; this finding is a significant step forward in our understanding of rocky bodies in the solar system.”
It’s not clear why Itokawa has such different densities at opposite sides of its peanut shape; perhaps it was two asteroids that rubbed up against each other and merged. At just shy of six American football fields long, the space rock has density varying from 1.75 to 2.85 grams per cubic centimetre. This precise measurement came courtesy of the European Southern Observatory’s New Technology Telescope in Chile.
The telescope calculated the speed and speed changes of Itokawa’s spin and combined that information with data on how sunlight can affect the spin rate. Asteroids are generally tiny and irregularly shaped sorts of bodies, which means the effect of heat on the body is not evenly distributed. That small difference makes the asteroid’s spin rate change.
This heat effect (more properly called the Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack effect) is slowly making Itokawa’s spin rate go faster, at a rate of 0.045 seconds every Earth year. This change, previously unexpected by scientists, is only possible if the peanut bulges have different densities, the scientists said.
“Finding that asteroids don’t have homogeneous interiors has far-reaching implications, particularly for models of binary asteroid formation,” added Lowry. “It could also help with work on reducing the danger of asteroid collisions with Earth, or with plans for future trips to these rocky bodies.”
Depiction of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) observatory as it approaches lunar orbit.Credit: NASA Ames/Dana Berry
Depiction of NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) observatory as it approaches lunar orbit.Credit: NASA Ames/Dana Berry
LADEE will now orbit far lower than ever before – details below![/caption]
LADEE, NASA’s latest lunar orbiter, is getting a new lease on life and will live a little longer to study the mysteries of the body’s tenuous atmosphere, or exosphere, and make surprising new discoveries while hugging Earth’s nearest neighbor even tighter than ever before, the team told Universe Today.
NASA has announced that the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission will be granted a month long extension since the residual rocket fuel is more than anticipated due to the expertise of LADEE’s navigation engineers.
This is great news because it means LADEE’s three research instruments will collect a big bonus of science measurements about the pristine lunar atmosphere and dust during an additional 28 days in an ultra tight low orbit skimming around the Moon.
And the extension news follows closely on the heels of LADEE being photographed in lunar orbit for the first time by a powerful camera aboard NASA’s five year old Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), her orbital NASA sister – detailed here.
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
LADEE is currently flying around the moon’s equator at altitudes ranging barely eight to 37 miles (12-60 kilometers) above the surface which crosses over from lunar day to lunar night approximately every two hours.
During the extended mission lasting an additional full lunar cycle, LADEE will fly even lower to within a few miles (km) thereby allowing scientists an exceptional vantage point to unravel the mysteries of the moon’s atmosphere.
Just how low will LADEE fly?
I asked Rick Elphic, LADEE project scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
“We will be taking LADEE from its nominal 20 to 50 kilometer periapsis right down to the treetops — we want to get data from 5 kilometers or even less!” Elphic told me.
“So far we’ve been keeping a healthy margin for spacecraft safety, but after the nominal mission is completed, we will relax those requirements in the interest of new science.”
With the measurements collected so far the science team has already established a baseline of data for the tenuous lunar atmosphere, or exosphere, and dust impacts, says NASA.
Therefore the LADEE team is free to fly the spacecraft much lower than ever before.
And why even go to lower altitudes? I asked Elphic.
Basically because the team hopes to see changes in the particle density and composition.
“The density depends on the species. For instance, argon-40 is heavier than neon-20, and has a lower scale height. That means we should see a big increase in argon compared to neon.”
“And we may see the heavier species for the first time at these really low altitudes.”
“It’s remotely possible we’ll see krypton, for instance.”
“But the real boon will be in the dust measurements.”
“LDEX (The Lunar Dust Experiment) will be measuring dust densities very close to the surface, and we will see if something new shows up. Each time we’ve dropped our orbit down to lower altitudes, we’ve been surprised by new things,” Elphic told Universe Today.
The Neutral Mass Spectrometer (NMS) instrument will measure the identity and abundances of the exospheres constituents, such as argon, neon and krypton.
LADEE Science Instrument locations
With the extension, LADEE is expected to continue capturing data in orbit until about April 21, 2014, depending on the usage of the declining on board fuel to feed its maneuvering thrusters.
“LADEE is investigating the moons tenuous exosphere, trace outgases like the sodium halo and lofted dust at the terminator,” Jim Green, Planetary Science Division Director at NASA HQ, told me earlier in an exclusive interview.
“The spacecraft has a mass spectrometer to identify the gases, a physical dust detector and an imager to look at scattered light from the dust. These processes also occur at asteroids.”
The Lunar Dust Experiment (LDEX) recorded dust impacts as soon as its cover opened, says NASA and is also seeing occasional bursts of dust impacts caused by meteoroid showers, such as the Geminids.
By studying the raised lunar dust, scientists also hope to solve a 40 year old mystery – Why did the Apollo astronauts and early unmanned landers see a glow of rays and streamers at the moon’s horizon stretching high into the lunar sky.
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.
And the team had told me before launch that an extension was rather unlikely since the spacecraft would be flying in such a very low science orbit of about 50 kilometers altitude above the moon that it will require considerable fuel to maintain.
“LADEE is limited by the amount of onboard fuel required to maintain orbit,” Doug Voss, launch manager, Wallops, told me.
So what accounts for the extension?
Basically it’s because of the expert navigation by NASA’s engineers and the Orbital Sciences Minotaur V rocket and upper stages following the spectacular night time LADEE blastoff from NASA Wallops, VA, on Sept. 6, 2013 and subsequent insertion into lunar orbit.
“The launch vehicle performance and orbit capture burns using LADEE’s onboard engines were extremely accurate, so the spacecraft had significant propellant remaining to enable extra science,” said Butler Hine, LADEE project manager at NASA’s Ames where the mission was designed, built, tested, in a NASA statement.
“This extension represents a tremendous increase in the amount of science data returned from the mission.”
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
“LADEE launched with 134.5 kilograms of fuel. After the third lunar orbit insertion burn (LOI-3), 80% of our fuel had been consumed,” said Dawn McIntosh, LADEE deputy project manager at NASA Ames Research Center, in an exclusive interview with Universe Today.
“Additional orbit-lowering maneuvers with the orbital control system (OCS) and reaction control system (RCS) of approximately 40 seconds were used to get LADEE into the science orbit.
And LADEE’s orbit capture was accomplished amidst the ridiculous US government shutdown with a skeleton crew.
The spacecraft finally entered its planned two hour science orbit around the moon’s equator on Nov. 20.
So LADEE’s orbital lifetime depends entirely on the remaining quantity of rocket fuel.
“LADEE has about 20 kg of propellant remaining today,” Butler Hine told Universe Today.
The 844 pound (383 kg) robot explorer is the size of a couch and was assembled at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and is a cooperative project with NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland.
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
The $280 million probe is built on a revolutionary ‘modular common spacecraft bus’, or body, that could dramatically cut the cost of exploring space and also be utilized on space probes to explore a wide variety of inviting targets in the solar system.
“LADEE is the first in a new class of interplanetary exploration missions,” NASA Ames Center Director Pete Worden told me in an interview. “It will study the pristine moon to study significant questions.”
“This is probably our last best chance to study the pristine Moon before there is a lot of human activity there changing things.”
To date LADEE has traveled over 1 million miles and in excess of 1200 equatorial orbits around the Moon.
LADEE is also searching for any changes caused to the exosphere and dust by the landing of China’s maiden Chang’e-3 lander and Yutu moon rover in December 2013.
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing LADEE, Chang’e-3, Orion, Orbital Sciences, SpaceX, commercial space, Mars rover and more news.
Paul Mahaffy, LADEE Neutral Mass Spectrometer instrument, principal investigator, and Ken Kremer/Universe Today discuss LADEE science at NASA Wallops Flight Facility, VA. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com
Diagram of Kepler-413b's unusual orbit around red and orange dwarf stars. Its orbit "wobbles" or precesses around the stars every 11 years. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)
We’re lucky to live on a planet where it’s predictably warmer in the summer and colder in the winter in many regions, at least within a certain range. On Kepler-413b, it’s a world where you’d have to check the forecast more frequently, because its axis swings by a wild 30 degrees every 11 years. On Earth, by comparison, it takes 26,000 years to tilt by a somewhat lesser amount (23.5 degrees).
The exoplanet, which is 2,300 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, orbits two dwarf stars — an orange one and a red one — every 66 days. While it would be fun to imagine a weather forecast on this planet, in reality it’s likely too hot for life (it’s close to its parent stars) and also huge, at 65 Earth-masses or a “super-Neptune.”
What’s even weirder is how hard it was to characterize the planet. Normally, astronomers spot these worlds either by watching them go across the face of their parent star(s), or by the gravitational wobbles they induce in those stars. The orbit, however, is tilted 2.5 degrees to the stars, which makes the transits far more unpredictable. It took several years of Kepler space telescope data to find a pattern.
“What we see in the Kepler data over 1,500 days is three transits in the first 180 days (one transit every 66 days), then we had 800 days with no transits at all,” stated Veselin Kostov, the principal investigator on the observation. “After that, we saw five more transits in a row,” added Kostov, who works both with the the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.
It will be an astounding six years until the next transit happens in 2020, partly because of that wobble and partly because the stars have small diameters and aren’t exactly “edge-on” to our view from Earth. As for why this planet is behaving the way it does, no one is sure. Maybe other planets are messing with the orbit, or a third star is doing the same thing.
The next major question, the astronomers added, is if there are other planets out there like this that we just can’t see because of the gap between transit periods.
You can read more about this finding in The Astrophysical Journal (a Jan. 29 publication that doesn’t appear to be on the website yet) or in preprint version on Arxiv.
