Charles Duke in a light-hearted moment during Apollo 16. Credit: NASA
Astronaut pranks are, well, just a part of the job. Often they poke at a sore spot in the astronaut’s history, and Charles Duke found himself the subject of a particularly painful one in the 1970s.
Duke was in the final moments of preparations before climbing into the Apollo 16 spacecraft, which was exploring the Moon in this week in 1972. It was a serious moment as Duke and his crew were about to rocket off to the moon. Then Duke got a surprise, courtesy of backup commander Fred Haise, as Duke recalled in an interview with NASA in 1999.
We were up climbing into the command module on the launch pad, and [launch pad leader] Guenter Wendt and the team were up there. And so John gets in, and I’m the next in on the right side. And as I start to climb in, I reach in and I look over and taped to the back of my seat was a big thing, “Typhoid Mary suit—seat.” So, we had a … laugh over that. Yeah, Fred would never let me forget that.
Typhoid Mary referred to Mary Mallon, a cook who was put under quarantine for the latter half of her life in the 1900s — against her stringent objections. She was accused of passing along typhoid to several families for which she did cooking, even though she didn’t show any symptoms herself. At the time, typhoid had no cure. Her curious story has been the subject of a PBS show and numerous books.
The joke on Duke hearkened back to the ill-fated Apollo 13 two years before, when Duke’s son caught the German measles. Duke fell ill and unwittingly exposed several astronauts during his contagion period — including the upcoming Apollo 13 prime crew of Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Ken Mattingly.
Of the three crew members, Mattingly had not been exposed to the German measles. This led to Mattingly being yanked from the mission days before launch. Adding to the drama, Apollo 13 suffered an explosion in space that crippled the spacecraft and, without the extraordinary efforts of the astronauts and Mission Control, could have killed the crew.
Anyway, Apollo 13 came back safely, and in 1972 lessons had been learned from the mission. Haise, to his credit, wasn’t afraid to poke a little fun at the early havoc Duke’s illness wreaked on his crew.
Daphnis' gravity disturbs the edges of the Keeler Gap as it travels along
Captured on January 15, this narrow-angle Cassini image shows an outer portion of Saturn’s A ring on the left and the ropy F ring crossing on the right. The thin black line near the A ring’s bright edge is the Keeler Gap, a 22-mile-wide space cleared by the passage of Daphnis, a shepherd moon barely 5 miles (about 7.5 km) across. As it travels around Saturn within the gap its gravity perturbs the fine icy particles within the rings, sending up rippling waves both before and behind it — visible here near the upper center.
From Cassini’s distance of 870,000 miles (1.4 million km) Daphnis itself is just barely visible as a single pixel within the Gap — can you see it? If not, click below…
There it is:
Highlighting Daphnis inside the Keeler Gap
While lacking the murky mystery of Titan’s atmosphere, Enceladus’ dramatic jets and the tortured and cratered surfaces found on Dione, Rhea, Mimas and many of Saturn’s larger icy moons, little Daphnis has always fascinated me because of the scalloped waves it kicks up within Saturn’s rings. Eventually these waves settle back down, but at their highest they can extend a mile or two above and below the ring plane!
Daphnis’ wake casts peaked shadows on the rings
This effect was most pronounced during Saturn’s spring equinox in August 2009 when sunlight was striking the rings edge-on, creating strong shadows from any areas of relief.
Imagine the impressive view you’d have if you were nearby, positioned just above the rings as Daphnis approached and hurtled past, the rings rising up in mile-high peaks from the moon’s gravity before smoothing out again. Incredible!
Daphnis seen by Cassini in June 2010 (NASA/JPL/SSI)
And I’m not the only one to imagine such a scene either — apparently artist Erik Svensson is also intrigued by Daphnis, enough to have been inspired to create the image below. How very cool!
Like its larger shepherd moon sister Prometheus, Daphnis may be little but still has a big effect on the icy stuff that makes up Saturn’s iconic rings.
And for lots more views of Daphnis click here (but watch out, it may just become your favorite moon too!)
Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield in the Cupola of the International Space Station. Credit: NASA/CSA
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been called “the internet’s favorite astronaut” and with over 700,000 followers on Twitter, he may be one of the reasons why space is “hot” these days.
A new show featuring Hadfield’s mission on the International Space Station will air on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on Thursday, April 25 and then will be available world-wide online on April 26.
UPDATE: The online version of this show is now available on CBC here.
CBC’s The Nature of Things is broadcasting “The Man Who Tweeted Earth,”,which looks at Hadfield’s mission and features other astronauts, scientific collaborators, Hadfield’s secret weapon family member (his son) and the Mission Control staff at the Canadian Space Agency and NASA.
Also, Universe Today is proud to say that our own Elizabeth Howell is also part of this broadcast, and she’s event featured on this trailer from the CBC!:
“Essentially, I talk about the techniques Hadfield uses to keep people engaged,” Elizabeth told me, as a teaser for the show. “He tweets about people’s hometowns, for example. I also mentioned the Shatner tweeting incident and how other Star Trek actors reacted. The entire show focuses on Hadfield on the station, the experiments he’s doing, and how folks are reacting to it.”
Elizabeth added that other astronauts and “lots of smart people” are part of the show.
For those of you in Canada (and anyone who otherwise has access to the CBC) the TV broadcast is on Thursday, April 25 at 8 p.m. (8:30 NT) on CBC-TV. There are other re-broadcasts later, so check the CBC’s website for info and to verify the times it is being shown in your time zone.
The show will be available online starting Friday, April 26th at: http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episode/the-man-who-tweeted-earth.html
The Nature of Things is CBC’s flagship science television documentary show and has been broadcasting award-winning shows for more than five decades.
A few years back, when we were all a little younger and less jaded – okay – when I was younger and less jaded (!) Universe Today reviewed the book The Rocket Company. This book speaks to the need of bootstraping our way into funding massive space projects privately, using our own gumption, connections and personalities, and doing so without the help of big governmental organizations because, let’s face it, there is less and less of the proverbial pie to go around.
This fictional book is becoming more lifelike as time goes on with companies like Deep Space Industries, Planetary Resources and many, many others, looking to explore the infinite possibilities our Universe has to offer. On April 30th, this title will be available for free on Amazon.
But for those of you who like the feel and smell of a book in your hands, Patrick Stiennon is giving away 3 free print copies of this book to three lucky Universe Today winners.
This giveaway will run for a week starting today, so get your entries in! How?
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 Wednesday, May 1, 2013. We’ll send you a confirmation email, so you’ll need to click that to be entered into the drawing.
We’re only going to use these email addresses for Universe Today giveaways/contests and announcements. We won’t be using them for any other purpose, and we definitely won’t be selling the addresses to anyone else. Once you’re on the giveaway notification list, you’ll be able to unsubscribe any time you like.
The Cygnus mass simulator separates from the Antares rocket on its inaugural flight on April 21, 2013. Image was taken by a camera onboard the rocket. Credit: Orbital Sciences Corporation.
This image almost looks like an artist’s concept, but is an actual photo taken by a camera on board Orbital Science’s Antares rocket showing the Cygnus mass simulator shortly after separation from the rocket’s upper stage.
Antares launched on April 21 for its first test flight – dubbed the A-One mission. The goal of the flight was to test the fully integrated Antares rocket and boost a simulated version of the Cygnus cargo carrier into a target orbit of 250 x 300 kilometers and inclined 51.6 degrees.
Antares also sent a trio of off-the-shelf-smartphone “PhoneSats” to orbit. The three picture-taking satellites are named Alexander, Graham and Bell and are some of the lowest-cost satellites ever flown in space.
Orbital says that both the mass simulator and the upper stage are expected to stay in orbit for several months before their orbits degrade, causing them to re-enter and burn up in the atmosphere.
A test flight of an actual Cygnus capsule is expected later this year, and is currently scheduled for June 2013.
Animation of Comet 2012 F6 Lemmon as seen from NASA's STEREO ahead spacecraft. (Credit: NASA/GFSC; animation created by Robert Kaufman).
An icy interloper was in the sights of a NASA spacecraft this past weekend.
Comet 2012 F6 Lemmon passed through the field of view of NASA’s HI2A camera as seen from its solar observing STEREO Ahead spacecraft. As seen in the animation above put together by Robert Kaufman, Comet Lemmon is now displaying a fine ion and dust tail as it sweeps back out of the inner solar system on its 10,750 year plus orbit.
Comet Lemmon has been a dependable performer for southern hemisphere observers early in 2013. As we reported earlier this month for Universe Today, this comet is now becoming a binocular object low in the dawn sky for northern hemisphere astronomers.
Comet Lemmon passed perihelion at 0.73 astronomical units from the Sun on March 24th. It’s currently in the +4th to +5 magnitude range as it heads northward through the constellation Pisces.
NASA’s twin Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft often catch sungrazing comets as they observe the Sun. Known as STEREO A (Ahead) & STEREO B (Behind), these observatories are positioned in Earth leading and trailing orbits. This provides researchers with full 360 degree coverage of the Sun. Launched in 2006, STEREO also gives us a unique perspective to spy incoming sungrazing comets. Recently, STEREO also caught Comet 2011 L4 PanSTARRS and the Earth as the pair slid into view.
Another solar observing spacecraft, the European Space Agencies’ SOlar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has been a prolific comet discoverer. Amateur comet sleuths often catch new Kreutz group sungrazers in the act. Thus far, SOHO has discovered over 2400 comets since its launch in 1995. SOHO won’t see PanSTARRS or Lemmon in its LASCO C3 camera but will catch a glimpse of Comet 2012 S1 ISON as it nears the Sun late this coming November.
Like SOHO and NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, data from the twin STEREO spacecraft is available for daily perusal on their website. We first saw this past weekend’s animation of Comet Lemmon passing through STEREO’s field of view on the Yahoo STEREOHunters message board.
Here’s a cool but largely unrecognized fact about comets. As they move back out of the solar system, their dust tail streams out ahead of them, driven by the solar wind. I’ve even seen a few science fiction flicks get this wrong. We simply expect comets to always stream their tails out behind them!
Another observatory in our solar observing arsenal has also moved a little closer to operability recently. The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) arrived at Vandenberg recently in preparation for launch this summer on June 26th. IRIS will be deployed from a Pegasus XL rocket carried aloft by an L-1011. NuSTAR was launched in a similar fashion in 2012. A Pegasus XL rocket will also launch the TESS exoplanet hunting satellite in 2017.
Keep an eye out for Comet Lemmon as it emerges from the dawn twilight in the days ahead. Also, be sure to post those pics to Universe Today’s Flickr community, and keep tabs on the sungrazing action provided to us by SOHO and STEREO!
Comet PANSTARRS as seen over Payson, Arizona on April 24, 2013. Credit and copyright: Chris Schur
While Comet C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) is fading to barely naked-eye and binocular visibility (the comet has lost a full magnitude approximately every week since perihelion on March 9), astrophotographers are still able to track down the comet as it moves away from the Sun. This deep color exposure by Chris Schur in Arizona is still able to show surprising detail and Chris said via email that he was “surprised how beautifully colored the stars are in this part of the Milky Way.” Chris’s shot is a 25 minute exposure, and is an LRGB (Luminance, Red, Green and Blue — is a photographic technique used in amateur astronomy for producing good quality color photographs by combining a high-quality black-and-white image with a color image).
See some more recent PANSTARRS images from around the world, below, plus an awesome new timelapse from TWAN (The World At Night) photographer P-M Hedén:
Comet C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) on April 23, 2013. Credit and copyright: Paul M. Hutchinson.Comet PANSTARRS and star trails on April 21, 2013. Credit and copyright: David G. Strange.Comet C/2011 L4 PanSTARRS in false color, ‘sigma combined and rotational gradient filter (inset) C8 @ f/2 85mins. exposure. April 19, 2013. Credit and copyright: David G. Strange.Comet C.2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) on April 15, 2013. A 5 minute exposure with a Zeiss 80mm astrograph with DSLR camera. Credit and copyright: Chris Schur.
This shot was taken on April 2 when Comet PANSTARRS was snuggling up in the sky with the Andromeda Galaxy, but this beautiful image is a recent addition to Universe Today’s Flickr page. You can see more images of PANSTARRS and the Andromeda Galaxy here and here.
13 frame stack of Comet PanSTARRS and the Andromedaa Galaxy on April 2, 2013 as seen over Leitrim, Ireland. Canon 200mm. Credit and copyright: Martin Campbell.
Want to get your astrophoto featured on Universe Today? Join our Flickr group or send us your images by email (this means you’re giving us permission to post them). Please explain what’s in the picture, when you took it, the equipment you used, etc.
NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough works outside the International Space Station in 2008. Credit: NASA
Think about your typical construction worker — there’s a lot of reaching, bending, stretching, lifting. How do you accomplish those tasks without gravity, as astronauts do on the International Space Station?
According to astronaut Shane Kimbrough — who should know, as he spent more than 12 hours “outside” doing station work and repairs during shuttle mission STS-126 in 2008 — instead of using your feet, you transfer most of the work to your hands. Your feet are basically used to brace yourself.
“You’re moving around, kind of walking with your hands, and pulling yourself in between the handholds and the rails,” he said to Universe Today, expanding on comments he made publicly at a conference last week.
Astronauts train for hours in a large pool known as the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, which includes a full-size model of the station modules inside. “You build up the [hand] strength in the NBL,” Kimbrough said, “with your hands fighting against the pressure of the spacesuit. If you didn’t do that, your hands would be fatigued [during a spacewalk.]”
It’s not a perfect training environment, though. “The big difference in the water is the drag it produces. You don’t realize you are floating, at times. If you’re moving along and walking with your hands down the rail, and you stop, you will immediately stop. In space, the mass of your spacesuit keeps going even if you stop. Your body will keep moving back and forth a few times, and using more energy when you need.”
Shane Kimbrough spent more than 12 hours outside the International Space Station during one mission. Credit: NASA
During the shuttle era, astronauts tended to specialize in different areas of spaceflight — robotics and extra-vehicular activity (spacewalks) being some of the fields. The station, however, demands that astronauts be versed in both, Kimbrough said. Any crew could be called upon to do a repair on short notice, or to haul in a robotic spacecraft (like SpaceX’s Dragon) that arrives at station.
This means there’s a huge demand within NASA now for spacewalking expertise. Before stepping into the NBL, the astronauts run through the procedures in the classroom, and will get a look at the tools to make sure they understand their functions. Occasionally, a crew might pop on scuba suits to do a rough run of an expected spacewalk at the station, rehearsing where they should be and how they should position themselves.
A spacesuit really limits the astronaut’s range of motion, making the hours of training crucial. “For people like myself, with short arms, our work envelope is very small,” said Kimbrough, who is hoping for another flight assignment.
“It’s really out in front, not very far, in a circular motion. If you put your hand out in front, a small circle, that’s my work envelope. If I want to get something higher or lower, I can’t get there by reaching based on the way the [spacesuit] shoulder and arm operates. You maybe have to go sideways or upside down.”
November 3, 2007 – Canadarm2 played a big role in helping astronauts fix a torn solar array. The arm’s reach was extended by the Orbiter Boom Sensor System, and here, allowing astronaut Scott Parazynski analyses the solar panel while anchored to the boom. Credit: NASA
Spacewalking is inherently a dangerous business. Many people remember a daring station-era spacewalk in 2007, when Scott Parazynski dangled on the end of a Canadarm2 extension to stitch together a torn — and live — solar array. For this spacewalk, a lot of procedures were put together on the fly.
NASA also has a computer program that can roughly simulate how the astronauts can get into various areas of the station, and this was extensively used before Parazynski’s spacewalk, Kimbrough said.
Kimbrough’s crew had a more messy problem as they worked to repair the broken solar array rotary joint (that controlled one of the station’s solar panel arrays) and do other station work. The grease guns the crew used in that mission periodically squirted way too much grease and covered everything. The work area, the spacesuits, the tools.
“It had to do with the thermal properties,” Kimbrough said. “It would go in between pretty hard, to not being so hard. So sometimes, the grease guns that were designed at the time leaked … they have been redesigned, a few modifications, and they’ve worked well since then.”
Kimbrough himself ran into a minor, but still surprising situation when at the end of a lengthy tether. It turned out that tether had a bit of zing to it. “I was working way out on the end of the truss, and it was nighttime and I felt somebody pulling me back and almost spinning me around. The force of it surprised me the most.”
Other astronauts had warned him about that ahead of time, Kimbrough said, but he didn’t realize how vehement the pull could be. “I was a believer after that,” he joked.
Screenshot of the Progress 51 launch. Via NASA TV.
The Russian Progress 51 cargo craft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan April 24, at 12:12 UTC (6:12 am EDT) and is on its way to the International Space Station. Unlike its three predecessors, Progress 51 will take the typical two-day rendezvous instead of the new 6-hour fast-track to reach the ISS. This is because of the phasing and orbital mechanics associated with this launch date. The unpiloted Progress is scheduled to dock to the aft port of the station’s Zvezda Service Module on April 26; however a problem arose when a rendezvous antenna did not deploy, which may affect the docking.
The Progress made it safely to orbit and deployed its solar arrays as planned. But one of the five sets of KURS automated rendezvous antennas used as navigational aids did not deploy. Russian ground controllers are assessing the antenna, which is used to measure orientation of the Progress vehicle, and how to troubleshoot the problem. We’ll keep you posted if the docking time changes.
On board are more than three tons of food, fuel, supplies and experiment hardware for the ISS Expedition 35 crew.
Composite Spitzer, Hubble, and Chandra image of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. A new study shows that a supernova as far away as 50 light years could have devastating effects on life on Earth. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/SAO)
“The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth,” Carl Sagan famously said in his iconic TV series Cosmos. But when two of those grains are made of a silicon-and-oxygen compound called silica, and they were found hiding deep inside ancient meteorites recovered from Antarctica, they very well may be from a star… possibly even the one whose explosive collapse sparked the formation of the Solar System itself.
Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis with support from the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences have announced the discovery of two microscopic grains of silica in primitive meteorites originating from two different sources. This discovery is surprising because silica — one of the main components of sand on Earth today — is not one of the minerals thought to have formed within the Sun’s early circumstellar disk of material.
Instead, it’s thought that the two silica grains were created by a single supernova that seeded the early solar system with its cast-off material and helped set into motion the eventual formation of the planets.
According to a news release by Washington University, “it’s a bit like learning the secrets of the family that lived in your house in the 1800s by examining dust particles they left behind in cracks in the floorboards.”
A 3.5-cm chondrite meteorite found in Antarctica in Nov. 1998. Dark meteorites show up well against the icy terrain of Antarctica. (Carnegie Mellon University)
Until the 1960s most scientists believed the early Solar System got so hot that presolar material could not have survived. But in 1987 scientists at the University of Chicago discovered miniscule diamonds in a primitive meteorite (ones that had not been heated and reworked). Since then they’ve found grains of more than ten other minerals in primitive meteorites.
The scientists can tell these grains came from ancient stars because they have highly unusual isotopic signatures, and different stars produce different proportions of isotopes.
But the material from which our Solar System was fashioned was mixed and homogenized before the planets formed. So all of the planets and the Sun have the pretty much the same “solar” isotopic composition.
Meteorites, most of which are pieces of asteroids, have the solar composition as well, but trapped deep within the primitive ones are pure samples of stars, and the isotopic compositions of these presolar grains can provide clues to their complex nuclear and convective processes.
The layered structure of a star about to go supernova; different layers contain different elements (Wikimedia)
Some models of stellar evolution predict that silica could condense in the cooler outer atmospheres of stars, but others say silicon would be completely consumed by the formation of magnesium- or iron-rich silicates, leaving none to form silica.
“We didn’t know which model was right and which was not, because the models had so many parameters,” said Pierre Haenecour, a graduate student in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University and the first author on a paper to be published in the May 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Under the guidance of physics professor Dr. Christine Floss, who found some of the first silica grains in a meteorite in 2009, Haenecour investigated slices of a primitive meteorite brought back from Antarctica and located a single grain of silica out of 138 presolar grains. The grain he found was rich in oxygen-18, signifying its source as from a core-collapse supernova.
Finding that along with another oxygen-18-enriched silica grain identified within another meteorite by graduate student Xuchao Zhao, Haenecour and his team set about figuring out how such silica grains could form within the collapsing layers of a dying star. They found they could reproduce the oxygen-18 enrichment of the two grains through the mixing of small amounts of material from a star’s oxygen-rich inner zones and the oxygen-18-rich helium/carbon zone with large amounts of material from the outer hydrogen envelope of the supernova.
In fact, Haenecour said, the mixing that produced the composition of the two grains was so similar, the grains might well have come from the same supernova — possibly the very same one that sparked the collapse of the molecular cloud that formed our Solar System.
“It’s a bit like learning the secrets of the family that lived in your house in the 1800s by examining dust particles they left behind in cracks in the floorboards.”
Ancient meteorites, a few microscopic grains of stellar sand, and a lot of lab work… it’s an example of cosmic forensics at its best!
