Universe Today

October 1, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

SpaceX Says Falcon 9 Upper Stage Did Not Explode in Orbit (and it wasn’t a UFO, either)

The launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 v.1.1 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on September 29, 2013. Credit: SpaceX.

When the US Space Surveillance Network indicated they were tracking additional objects in orbit following Sunday’s maiden launch of SpaceX’s next generation rocket, speculation began among satellite trackers that the upper stage of the Falcon 9 v1.1. rocket may have exploded. But SpaceX issued a statement today that their data indicates no such explosion occurred, and that insulation may have come off the second stage, creating extra objects.

Meanwhile, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk confirmed via Twitter that reports of a “fuzzy” UFO over South Africa following the launch came from liquid oxygen released by the Falcon 9 rocket’s second stage.

@DebbieViviers @SpaceX Yes, upper stage venting of liquid oxygen created a fast moving fuzzy white sphere in space over SA

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 29, 2013

In the September 29 launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, SpaceX successfully launched and deployed the Canadian Space Agency’s CASSIOPE weather satellite (Cascade, Smallsat, and Ionospheric Polar Explorer) and six additional small satellites.

SpaceTrack was tracking 20 objects from the launch, but only fourteen should have been in orbit (CASSIOPE, 6 small sats, 4 spacers from the POPACS satellite trio, the second stage and two fairings) leaving ssix objects unaccounted for.

“Regarding the rumors you may have heard about the Falcon 9 second stage, in short, our data confirms there was no rupture of any kind on the second stage,” SpaceX spokeswoman Emily Shanklin wrote in an email on October 1.

SpaceX gave this account of what likely happened after launch:

Following separation of the satellites to their correct orbit, the Falcon 9 second stage underwent a controlled venting of propellants (fuel and pressure were released from the tank) and the stage was successfully safed. During this process, it is possible insulation came off the fuel dome on the second stage and is the source of what some observers incorrectly interpreted as a rupture in the second stage. This material would be in several pieces and be reflective in the Space Track radar. It is also possible the debris came from the student satellite separation mechanisms onboard.

The new, more powerful version of the Falcon 9 is powered by a cluster of nine of the new Merlin 1D engines that are about 50% more powerful compared to the standard Merlin 1C engines and can therefore boost a much heavier cargo load to the ISS and beyond. The Falcon 9 v.1.1 is taller than a standard Falcon 9: about 22 stories high vs. 13.

Musk told reporters at a post-launch news conference that they attempted to reignite the upper stage after payload separation for demonstrating the capability of putting satellites into a geostationary transfer orbit. However, the reignition sequence was aborted after a problem was detected.

Several images and videos were posted online of a UFO seen over South Africa, Madagascar, Botswana, and Malawi. But it was quickly determined to be a cloud of rocket propellant surrounding the spent Falcon 9 upper stage.

SpaceX said they will continue to review their data to help identify the source of the extra debris.

October 1, 2013December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

55 Years of NASA

55 Years of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Credit: NASA.

Today is NASA’s 55th birthday. Unfortunately, the celebration is muted due to the government shutdown, forcing much of NASA to shut down as well for the time being (see our overview of what’s still running at NASA and what’s not).

Before having to close the door (temporarily) today, NASA put together this nice graphic of the highlights of their accomplishments of the past 55 years, as well as what the hopes and plans are for the future.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration began operating on October 1, 1958, managing the US’s burgeoning space exploration program. NASA replaced the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) agency, which began in 1915 to undertake and promote aeronautical research.

Now, NASA is in the midst of expanding commercial access to the International Space Station with the rendezvous of Orbital Science’s Cygnus capsule this week. While the ISS is still operating, and when full operations resume throughout NASA, they’ll continue work on exploring space, monitoring Earth, unlocking mysteries of our solar system and peering back into the beginnings of the Universe.

Our advice to you? If you are a US citizen, write your Congress-people and tell them how important you feel NASA is to the future of the nation and the world. And while you’re at it, tell them to get to work and do the job they were elected to do. Find out who represents you in the US Congress here.

October 1, 2013December 23, 2015 by Elizabeth Howell

This Very Old Cosmic Light Has A Bend To It

Artist's impression of how huge cosmic structures deflect photons in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration

Leftover radiation from the Big Bang — that expansion that kick-started the universe — can be bent by huge cosmic structures, just like other light that we see in the universe. While the finding seems esoteric at first glance, scientists say the discovery could pave the way for finding a similar kind of signal that indicate the presence of gravitational waves in the moments after the universe was born.

That light is called the cosmic microwave background and is the radiation that was visible when the universe became transparent to radiation, 380,000 years after the Big Bang. A tiny bit of the CMB is polarized. There are two types of polarized light in the CMB: E-modes (first detected in 2002) and B-modes (which were just detected using a telescope in Antarctica and ESA’s Herschel space observatory.

“[B-modes] can arise in two ways,” the European Space Agency wrote in a press release.

“The first involves adding a twist to the light as it crosses the Universe and is deflected by galaxies and dark matter – a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. The second has its roots buried deep in the mechanics of a very rapid phase of enormous expansion of the Universe, which cosmologists believe happened just a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang – ‘inflation’.”

More results are on the way from ESA’s Planck telescope in 2014, at which point scientists hope to see this B-mode of the second type. For now, check out the full study in Physical Review Letters. There is also a preprint version available on Arxiv.

Sources: ESA and ESA Herschel

October 1, 2013December 23, 2015 by Elizabeth Howell

What Does The Government Shutdown Mean For NASA?

The MAVEN missions ‘Going to Mars’ campaign invites the public to submit names and poems which will be included on a special DVD. The DVD will be adhered to the MAVEN spacecraft and launched to Mars on Nov. 18, 2013. Credit: NASA/GSFC

A forthcoming NASA launch to Mars could be in danger of losing its launch window should a shutdown in the United States federal government that began today (Oct. 1) continue for a while. That’s just one of the ways in which NASA is affected amid a lapse of funding that is affecting all government agencies and an untold number of government contractors.

Around 97% of NASA’s 18,000 employees are off the job. Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and other social media accounts are going dark. NASA’s website is being pulled offline. NASA Television has also ceased broadcasting.

Beyond the agency’s public face, activities ranging from certain commercial crew payouts, to conference attendance, to scientific work will cease. Awards and scholarship approvals will be delayed.

“NASA will shut down almost entirely,” said President Barack Obama in a speech late Monday (Sept. 30).

In addition to the agency’s public relations activities, NASA is planning to launch the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft to Mars in November to examine the Red Planet’s atmosphere. There are all sorts of questions vexing scientists concerning that planet, with one of the most prominent ones being why the atmosphere thinned over the years.

Media reports indicate that if the shutdown is lengthy, MAVEN could miss the launch window and have to try again in 2016.

“A shutdown could delay the pre-launch processing currently under way with a possible impact to the scheduled Nov. 18 launch date,” Dwayne Brown, a NASA senior public affairs officer at NASA, told The Planetary Society in a story published yesterday (Sept. 30). The launch window extends for several weeks beyond that time, however.

The 3% of NASA employees who are deemed essential will work without pay until the situation is resolved. These are some of the things that will continue:

The International Space Station. Credit: NASA

International Space Station monitoring will be maintained, but with the bare minimum of ground crew. (NASA will cease regular updates of the astronauts’ activities during the furlough, although we presume if something urgent happened there would be an update.)
Robotic missions that are already in operation — think the Cassini spacecraft circling Saturn, or the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) winging its way to the moon — will have small crews making sure that they are functioning properly. No scientific analysis will be conducted, though.
Certain other programs will continue if a shutdown would be detrimental to their performance. Space News reports that the much-delayed James Webb Space Telescope will be among them, as some of its instruments are undergoing cryogenic vacuum testing at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
Update, 1:09 p.m. EDT: Several missions run out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Applied Physics Laboratory are running as usual for at least the next week because these facilities are running under contracted money from NASA and still have funds in the bank. According to the Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla: “At JPL, that includes: Curiosity; Opportunity; Odyssey; Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter; Cassini; Dawn; Juno; Spitzer; the Voyagers; and WISE, among many others. At APL, that includes MESSENGER and New Horizons. It also includes the Deep Space Network.”

Additional Update, 2:09 p.m. EDT: The HiRISE twitter account just replied to inquiries from several space journalists that they will be “open for business” as usual, which is great news since the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter made an audacious attempt to take images of Comet ISON during the comet’s closest approach to Mars today. We’ll provide any news and updates on images as they become available, but the HiRISE team said getting the images back to Earth and processing them may take a day or two.

HiRISE is still open for business and updates will continue as usual.

— HiRISE (@HiRISE) October 1, 2013

Many observers noted that NASA is marking its 55th anniversary today by shutting down its activities. There’s no word yet on when the deadlock in Congress will be resolved. The last two shutdowns in 1995 and 1996 (which began in the middle of the STS-74 shuttle mission to Mir) lasted several weeks.

October 1, 2013December 23, 2015 by Elizabeth Howell

First Cloudy Alien Planet Spotted From Earth

Cloud map of Kepler-7b (left) in comparison to Jupiter (right). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT

Call it cloudy with a low chance of meatballs. The alien world Kepler-7b — a very reflective world in big telescopes — has clouds in its upper atmosphere. And scientists have actually been able to map those out, despite the planet’s great distance from Earth (at least 1,000 light-years away.)

It’s the first time scientists have been able to map out clouds on a world outside of the solar system. If we can see clouds, then we can begin to think about what a planet’s climate will be, making this an important milestone in understanding the conditions on other worlds.

“Kepler-7b reflects much more light than most giant planets we’ve found, which we attribute to clouds in the upper atmosphere,” stated Thomas Barclay, Kepler scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “Unlike those on Earth, the cloud patterns on this planet do not seem to change much over time — it has a remarkably stable climate.”

Illustration of the Kepler spacecraft (NASA/Kepler mission/Wendy Stenzel)

Here’s how scientists got it done:

Preliminary observations with the Kepler space telescope –which was designed to hunt planets until a second reaction wheel failed earlier this year — found “moon-like phases” on Kepler-7b. These showed a bright spot on the western hemisphere.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope measured Kepler-7b’s temperature using infrared light, calculating it at between 1,500 and 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (815 and 982 degrees Celsius.)
Something was clearly going on, as the planet is extremely close to its star; only 0.06 Earth-sun distances away. The temperature was too cool. They figured out that the light was reflected off cloud tops on the planet’s west side.

Another cool fact — Kepler-7b, like Saturn, would float if it was put in a big enough tub of water!

You can read more details in the technical paper online here. The study, which was led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been accepted to the Astrophysical Journal, but not published yet.

Source: NASA

October 1, 2013December 23, 2015 by Carnival of Space

Carnival of Space #321

Carnival of Space. Image by Jason Major.

This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Stefan Lamoureux at his Links Through Space blog.

Click here to read Carnival of Space #321.

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.

September 30, 2013December 23, 2015 by Fraser Cain

How Long Will Life Survive on Earth?

A powerful X-class solar flare erupting on the sun on July 6, 2012 photographed by the Solar Dynamics Observers. Credit: NASA

Life has existed on Earth for billions of years, appearing shortly after the planet had cooled and liquid water became available.

From the first bacteria to the amazingly complex animals we see today, life has colonized every corner of our planet.

As you know, our Sun has a limited lifespan.

Over the next 5 billion years, it will burn the last of its hydrogen, bloat up as a red giant and consume Mercury and Venus.

This would be totally disastrous for local flora and fauna, but all life on the surface of the Earth will already be long gone.

In fact, we have less than a billion years to enjoy the surface of our planet before it becomes inhospitable.

Because our Sun… is heating up.

You can’t feel it over the course of a human lifetime, but over hundreds of millions of years, the amount of radiation pouring out of the Sun will grow.

This will heat the surface of our planet to the point that the oceans boil.

At the core of the Sun, the high temperatures and pressures convert hydrogen into helium. For every tonne of material the Sun converts, it shrinks a bit making the Sun denser, and a little hotter.

Over the course of the next billion years or so, the amount of energy the Earth receives from the Sun will increase by about 10%. Which doesn’t sound like much, but it means a greenhouse effect of epic proportions.

A TerraSAR-X stripmap image from 23 April 2009. The larger icebergs are bright, while smaller icebergs are capsized and appear as dark blocks. The inset shows two superimposed Envisat ASAR images from 24 and 27 April. The region outlined in red indicates the area of the TerraSAR-X image. Credits: DLR, ESA (Annotations by A. Humbert, Münster University — A TerraSAR-X stripmap image of icebergs.

Whatever is left of the ice caps will melt, and the water itself will boil away, leaving the planet dry and parched. Water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, this will drive the temperatures even hotter.

Plate tectonics will shut down, and all the carbon will be stripped from the atmosphere.

It’ll be bad.

As temperatures rise, complex lifeforms will find life on Earth less hospitable. It will seem as if evolution is running in reverse, as plants and animals die off, leaving the invertebrates and eventually just microbial life.

This rise in temperature will be the end of life on the surface of Earth as we know it.

Still, there are reserves of water deep underground which will continue to protect microbial life for billions of years.

Perhaps they’ll experience that final baking when the Sun does reach the end of its life.

Even a few hundred million years is an incomprehensible amount of time compared to the age of our civilization.

If humanity does survive well into the future, is there anything we could do about this problem?

As the Sun heats up, making Earth inhospitable, it heats up the rest of the Solar System too. Frozen worlds in the Solar System will melt, becoming more habitable.

Encaladus, a moon of Saturn, as shown in this Voyager 1 image. Credit: NASA

It’s possible that future civilizations could relocate to the asteroid belt, or the moons of Saturn. We could try something even more radical: move the Earth.

By carefully steering asteroids so they barely miss us, an advanced civilization could distort the Earth’s orbit, relocating our planet further from the Sun.

As the Sun heats up, our planet would be continuously repositioned so the surface temperature stays roughly the same. Of course, this would be tricky business. Make the wrong move, and you’re facing the frigid cold of the outer Solar System.

So there’s no need to panic. Life here has a few hundred million years left; a billion, tops. But if we want to continue on for billions of years, we’ll want to add solar heating to our growing list of big problems.

September 30, 2013December 23, 2015 by Katrina Cain

Giveaway: Sky Live for iOS5 and Up

A new app called “Sky Live” was just released from Vito Technologies and it will save you countless planning hours in your stargazing agendas. Vito Technologies, through a super-secret process, has discovered a way to give users a sky watching forecast anywhere in the world for up to 7 days in advance.

Were you planning a camping trip to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower? Is Venus going to be in the perfect spot in the sky to pull out your telescope and have a sky watching party? Sky watching is heavily dependant upon weather conditions and all that careful party planning is out the window when a bank of clouds settles in.

Universe Today and Vito Technologies is giving away 10 free copies of this app. How do you enter your name for this “appy” goodness?

In order to be entered into the giveaway drawing, just put your email address into the box at the bottom of this post (where it says “Enter the Giveaway”) before Monday, October 7, 2013. We’ll send you a confirmation email, so you’ll need to click that to be entered into the drawing.

More info on this app from the Publisher:

What it does: The main screen gives you one number: let’s say 78%.

Same as Fahrenheit degrees in weather, this percentage gives you at-a-glance info on how good tonight is for stargazing. The number is calculated with a special formula that takes into account things like is there anything interesting in the sky tonight, how cloudy, how bright is the Moon, etc.

Why it is different:

The formula for our Stargazing Index is superbly original and highly confidential. Combined with stunning space images, we hope this will be the most beautiful and accurate stargazing forecast on the AppStore.

Highlights:

– New app from the developers of Apple Design Award winning stargazing app with over 7 mln users

– Designed specifically for iOS7 (but will work on everything starting with iOS 5): blur and parallax, stunning graphics

– Detailed info on stargazing conditions for any location in the world for seven days ahead

– Moon phases

– Rise, set, culmination/azimuth for the most important objects: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and the International Space Station

– Cloudiness

– Weather forecast

– Light pollution

– The International Space Station position over the map

– ISS crew data

September 30, 2013December 28, 2015 by Fraser Cain

Astronomy Cast 315 – Particle Accelerators

Who knew that destruction could be so informative? Only by smashing particles together with more and more energy, can we truly tease out the fundamental forces of nature. Join us to discover the different kinds of accelerators (both natural and artificial) and what questions they can help us answer.

Visit the Astronomy Cast Page to subscribe to the audio podcast!

We record Astronomy Cast as a live Google+ Hangout on Air every Monday at 12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern. You can watch here on Universe Today or from the Astronomy Cast Google+ page.

September 30, 2013April 26, 2016 by Elizabeth Howell

Are Black Holes Hairy, Or Better Described By Clean Physics?

Black holes are a spot in the universe where you won’t see the sun shine in, to paraphrase that 1960s rock-musical Hair. But speaking of “hair”, a group of scientists says these singularities may have matter (sometimes referred to as “hair”) that could affect how they appear.

This is a tangled concept to figure out (so to speak), so let’s unpack what the new study in Physical Review Letters means.

When black hole understanding was still in its infancy in the scientific literature, physicist John Wheeler wrote a phrase that is now famous among scientists in that field: “Black holes have no hair.” His phrase referred to how black holes are defined, which he believed came down to only two factors: their mass, and their angular momentum, or the rotation velocity of the hole. (Some sources also say electric charge was included as a third factor.)

Say you have a black hole that was created out of a huge star that imploded. Even though the star itself had distinctive properties, this theory says they would vanish in a black hole. So to take that to a generality, Wheeler’s phrase said all black holes are essentially the same.

Where is the Nearest Black Hole — Artist concept of matter swirling around a black hole. (NASA/Dana Berry/SkyWorks Digital)

This understanding of black holes dates back to 1963, arising back to a “clean” black hole model first published by Roy Kerr. The new study agrees that Kerr’s work from 50 years ago works with general relativity, a theory from Einstein that (in very simple terms) says the laws of nature are consistent throughout the universe. (More at this past Universe Today article.) As the theory pertains to black holes, strong sources of gravity bend space and time.

Kerr’s theory, however, does not agree with extensions of Einstein’s work, the scientists said. These extensions are known as scalar-tensor theories and there are several variations on this topic. The physics deals with the interactions between two different types of fields, scalar and tensor. Scalar fields, according to this Massachusetts Institute of Technology paper, assign values for every point of space observed. (Think a temperature map of Mars). Tensor fields measure these variables with relation to each other.

This artist’s impression shows the surroundings of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the active galaxy NGC 3783 in the southern constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur). New observations using the Very Large Telescope Interferometer at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile have revealed not only the torus of hot dust around the black hole but also a wind of cool material in the polar regions. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser — This artist’s impression shows the surroundings of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the active galaxy NGC 3783 in the southern constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur). Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

The science team included Thomas Sotiriou, a physicist at the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy.

His team, Sotiriou said in a statement, “focused on the matter that normally surrounds realistic black holes, those observed by astrophysicists. This matter forces the pure and simple black hole hypothesized by Kerr to develop a new ‘charge’ (the hair, as we call it) which anchors it to the surrounding matter, and probably to the entire universe.

“According to our calculations,” he added, “the growth of the black hole’s hair is accompanied by the emission of distinctive gravitational waves.”

This model hasn’t been proved yet in by measurements, so this will be something for astronomical instruments to watch for in the coming decades. It also should be noted that other scientists have found different problems with the clean black-hole theory, which you can check out if you’re so inclined.

In the meantime, you can read the new study at this link. There is also a prepublished version available.

Source: Scuola Internzaionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati