A beautiful new book, “Your Ticket to the Universe: A Guide to Exploring the Cosmos” highlights some of the most fascinating and important sites in the universe, from those closest to us in our Solar System all the way to the Milky Way galaxy and beyond. All of these celestial landmarks are illustrated with beautiful, vivid photographs that bring them to life. You can read Jason Major’s full review of this book here.
This is an awesome compilation of images and information, and the book was written by by Kimberly K. Arcand and Megan Watzke, media coordinator and press officer and for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Thanks to Smithsonian Books, Universe Today has five copies of this book to giveaway!
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, April 1, 2013. We’ll send you a confirmation email, so you’ll need to click that to be entered into the drawing.
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Every once in a while an astronomy book comes out that combines stunning high-definition images from the world’s most advanced telescopes, comprehensive descriptions of cosmic objects that are both approachable and easy to understand (but not overly simplistic) and a gorgeous layout that makes every page spread visually exciting and enjoyable.
This is one of those books.
Your Ticket to the Universe: A Guide to Exploring the Cosmosis a wonderful astronomy book by Kimberly K. Arcand and Megan Watzke, media coordinator and press officer for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, respectively. Published by Smithsonian Books, it features 240 pages of gorgeous glossy images from space exploration missions, from the “backyard” of our own Solar System to the more exotic environments found throughout the Galaxy… and even beyond to the very edges of the visible Universe itself.
Find out how you can win a copy of this book here!
As members of the Chandra team, headquartered at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Kim and Megan have long had firsthand experience with incredible astronomical images — they previously designed and coordinated the internationally-acclaimed From Earth to the Universe and From Earth to the Solar System photo installation projects, which helped set up presentations of space exploration images in public locations around the world.
Your Ticket to the Universe takes such impressive images — from telescopes and observatories like Hubble, Spitzer, SDO, Chandra, Cassini, GOES, VLT, and many others, as well as from talented photographers on Earth and in orbit aboard the ISS — and puts them right into your hands, along with in-depth descriptions that are comprehensive yet accessible to even the most casual fans of space exploration.
This is my favorite kind of astronomy book. Although I look at images like the ones in Your Ticket to the Universe online every day, there’s something special about having them physically in front of you in print — and well-written text that can be understood by everyone is crucial, in my opinion, as it means a book may very well become an inspiration to a whole new generation of scientists and explorers.
“The sky belongs to everyone. That’s the premise of this guidebook to the Universe. You don’t need a medical degree to know when you’re sick or a doctorate in literature to appreciate a novel. In the same spirit, even those of us who don’t have advanced degrees in astronomy can gain access to all the wonder and experience that the Universe has to offer.”
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting co-author Kimberly Arcand on several occasions — I attended high school with her husband — and her knowledge about astronomy imaging as well as her ability to present it in an understandable way is truly impressive, to say the least. She’s quite an enthusiastic ambassador for space exploration, and Your Ticket to the Universe only serves to further demonstrate that.
I highly recommend it for anyone who finds our Universe fascinating.
Your Ticket to the Universe will be available online starting April 2 at Smithsonian Books, or you can pre-order a copy at Barnes & Noble or on Amazon.com. Don’t explore the cosmos without it!
The SpaceX Dragon commercially developed cargo craft loaded with thousands of pounds of precious science samples has departed from the International Space Station at 6:56 a.m EDT this morning (March 26) and is heading back to Earth today for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean at around 12:34 p.m EDT.
The ISS crew commanded the Dragon’s release by a trigger at the robotic work station inside the Cupola as they were soaring some 250 miles over the northeast coast of Australia after Mission Control gave the “GO for release”.
A video of the unberthing is below:
Cameras aboard both the ISS and Dragon transmitted breathtaking views of the departure maneuver. The entire ISS filled the video screen as Dragon slowly pulled away.
The private Dragon was unberthed from a docking port on the Harmony node at 4:10 a.m. EDT in anticipation of today’s return to Earth.
The capsule had been docked at the orbiting outpost for three weeks since arriving on March 3.
NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn and station commander Chris Hadfield from Canada opened the snares on the stations Canadian built robotic arm – Canadarm2 – firmly grasping the Dragon.
A series of three short departure burns executed in rapid succession took Dragon safely away from the ISS and beyond the imaginary 656-foot (200-meter) “Keep Out Sphere” around the station for the journey back to Earth.
Everything with Dragon happened as expected said NASA.
“All looks beautiful and nominal as expected,” radioed the ISS crew.
The Dragon capsule is the first private ship ever to dock at the ISS.
Dragon will fire its engines for the last time for the 10 minute long deorbit burn at 11:42 a.m. EDT sending it through the Earth’s atmosphere for a fiery reentry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean around 12:34 p.m.
“Sad to see the Dragon go,” said Marshburn. “She performed her job beautifully and is heading back to her lair. Wish her all the best for the splashdown today.”
A team of SpaceX engineers, technicians and divers will recover the vehicle after splashdown about 214 miles off the coast of Baja, California.
SpaceX recovery crews will pluck the capsule from the Pacific Ocean for the journey back to shore which will take about 30 hours.
Dragon had been scheduled to return yesterday on Monday, March 25, but was postponed due to inclement weather developing near its targeted splashdown site in the Pacific Ocean.
There was no affect on the return of the science samples and gear weighing a hefty 2668 pounds. Dragon is the only vehicle that can safely return significant amounts of science cargo and gear from the ISS following the retirement of NASA’s space shuttle orbiters.
A thruster failure shortly after liftoff nearly doomed the mission. But fast acting SpaceX engineers saved the day and restarted the engines a few hours later – read my earlier story here.
The resupply mission carried aloft some 1200 pounds of food, water and science experiments for the station crew.
After a two day flight, Marshburn captured the Dragon just 32 feet away from the station with the Canadarm2 on March 3. Ground controllers then took over Canadarm2 operations and berthed Dragon to the Harmony node.
SpaceX is under contract to NASA to deliver about 44,000 pounds of cargo to the ISS during a dozen flights over the next few years at a cost of about $1.6 Billion.
SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp are partnered with NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services program to replace the cargo up mass capability the US lost following the retirement of NASA’s space shuttle orbiters in 2011.
The maiden launch of Orbital’s Antares/Cygnus ISS cargo resupply program is now slated to occur on April 16-18 from NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia – read my onsite photo report here.
The inaugural Antares launch will be a test flight with a simulated Cygnus.
The next SpaceX Dragon flight – dubbed CRS-3 – is slated to blast off in late November 2013.
NASA’s Operation IceBridge has begun the 2013 research season of Ice Science flights in Greenland and the Arctic to survey the regions ice sheets and land and sea ice using a specially equipped P-3B research aircraft from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va.
Operation IceBridge began in 2009 as part of NASA’s six-year long effort to conduct the largest airborne survey of Earth’s polar ice ever flown.
The goal is to obtain an unprecedented three-dimensional, multi-instrument view of the behavior of Greenland, Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, ice shelves and sea ice which have been undergoing rapid and dramatic changes and reductions.
“We’re starting to see how the whole ice sheet is changing,” said Michael Studinger, IceBridge project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Thinning at the margins is now propagating to the interior.”
The airborne campaign was started in order to maintain a continuous record of measurements in changes in polar ice after NASA’s Earth orbiting ICESat (Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite) probe stopped collecting data in 2009.
ICESat-2 won’t be launched until 2016, so NASA’s IceBridge project and yearly P-3 airborne campaigns will fill in the science data gap in the interval.
The P-3B Orion just arrived from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia where I visited it before departure – see my P-3B photos herein.
IceBridge is operating out of airfields in Thule and Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, and Fairbanks, Alaska.
The P-3B survey flights over Greenland and the Arctic will continue until May. They are conducted over Antarctica during October and November.
The measurements collected by IceBridge instruments will characterize the annual changes in thickness of sea ice, glaciers, and ice sheets. The data are used to help predict how climate change affects Earth’s polar ice and the resulting rise in sea-levels.
Researchers with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are collaborating with the IceBridge project to collect snow depth measurements near Barrow , Alaska. High school science teachers from the US, Denmark and Greenland will fly along on the P-3B survey flights to learn about polar science.
NASA Wallops has a wide ranging research and development mission and is home to the Virginia launch pad for the new Antares/Cygnus commercial ISS resupply rocket set for its maiden launch in mid April 2013; detailed in see my new story – here.
A fine apparition of the planet Mercury graces the dawn skies this week, leading up to its greatest elongation from the Sun for 2013.
It seems that nearly every appearance of the planet Mercury is touted as the “best” these days. Such was the case with the inner-most world’s dusk showing early last month. Truth is, all elongations of Mercury (and Venus, for that matter) are not created equal, and visibility of each apparition isn’t the same for observers worldwide. We’ll show you why.
Mercury orbits the Sun once every 88 days. With an orbit interior to our own, it never strays far from the Sun in the sky and thus can only appear low in the dawn or dusk. Its orbit is also elliptical, with an eccentricity of 0.206, the greatest of any planet in our solar system. This means that greatest elongations can vary considerably, from 17.9° away from the Sun in the sky near perihelion of the planet to 28.7° near aphelion. And although reaching greatest elongation near aphelion means the tiny world is above the muck of the horizon, it also means it’s also intrinsically a bit fainter; Mercury can vary in brightness from magnitude -0.2 at a perihelic-elongation to half a magnitude fainter at +0.3 for an aphelic-elongation.
But there’s more. Compounding this situation is the angle of the ecliptic, or the imaginary plane of the orbit of the Earth. Near the March equinox the ecliptic rides high in the dusk to the west and low in the dawn to the east for northern hemisphere observers. In the southern hemisphere, the reverse is true. It’s a strange sight for a northerner to head “Down Under” and watch the Sun rise in the east, transit to the north and set to the west!
Thus what may be a terrible apparition of Mercury for one hemisphere may be a grand one for another, as is the case this week. Yes, northern observers can catch the fleeting world, if they know exactly where to look for it. For observers based at longitude 40° north, Mercury will never peak above an altitude of 10° in the dawn sky. Observers based near 35° south will however see the planet reach its maximum possible elevation of over 25° degrees above the horizon.
We would qualify this as “The best dawn appearance of Mercury for 2013… as seen from the southern hemisphere.” Greatest elongations of Mercury occur in pairs, with dusk-to-dawn apparitions about 45 days apart as the planet passes between us and the Sun, followed by a longer period of about 70 days as the world loops back around behind the Sun. The orbit of Mercury is tilted about 7° with respect to our own. Otherwise, we would see a transit of the planetevery inferior conjunction, as last occurred on November 8th, 2006 and will happen next on May 9th, 2016.
Mercury will show a maximum illumination area of 38.5” square arc seconds as seen from the Earth March 30th on just before reaching its greatest elongation west of the Sun on March 31st on Easter Day at 22:00 UT/18:00EDT. Through a telescope, Mercury will display a 7.7” diameter disk with a 50% illuminated “half-Moon” phase. Mercury reaches greatest elongation just 28 hours prior to aphelion which occurs on April 2nd, the closest this has occurred date-wise since April 8th, 2006. This won’t be matched again until March 24th, 2020. Shining at magnitude +0.3, Mercury will then race ahead of the Earth on its inside track and will begin to gradually sink lower on successive mornings in early April. The morning of April 8th may well offer the last good chance to spy the tiny world when the old crescent Moon passes just 8° degrees north of the planet within two days of reaching New phase on April 10th. Mercury reaches superior conjunction opposite to the Earth and on the far side of the Sun on May 11th, 2013, and will again head into the dusk skies for its next greatest eastern elongation on June 12th.
From our Earthly vantage point, Mercury completes 3.15 orbits of the Sun a year. This means that we see 6 greatest elongations on average most years, 3 westerns (dawn) and 3 easterns (dusk). The most elongations of Mercury that you can have in a calendar year are 7, which occurred in 2011 and will happen again in 2015. It’s fascinating to think that until the advent of the Space Age, the orbit and the rough size of Mercury was all we knew about the planet. It would take the first flyby of the Mariner 10 spacecraft to give us a close up view of Mercury in 1974. The precession of the orbit of Mercury was a mystery until explained by Einsteinian physics, and still stands as one of the great proofs of general relativity. Today, we have a permanent ambassador around Mercury, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft. MESSENGER has mapped to world in detail, sampled its tenuous exosphere, and observed hints of ancient volcanic activity. MESSENGER will be followed by the joint European Space Agency/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency mission BepiColombo set to launch in 2015 which will arrive at Mercury in 2022. All fascinating things to ponder as you search for the diminutive world low in the dawn skies this coming Easter weekend!
Curiosity is back! After a multi-week hiatus forced by a computer memory glitch, NASA’s mega rover is back to full operation.
And the proof is crystal clear in the beautiful new panoramic view (above) snapped by Curiosity this weekend from Yellowknife Bay, showing the robot’s arm and drill elevated and aiming straight at you – raring to go and ready to feast on something deliciously Martian.
“That drill is hungry, looking for something tasty to eat, and ‘you’ (loaded with water and organics) are it,” I thought with a chuckle as Curiosity seeks additional habitats and ingredients friendly to life.
So my imaging partner Marco Di Lorenzo and I celebrated the great news by quickly creating the new panoramic mosaic assembled from images taken on Saturday, March 23, or Sol 223, by the robot’s navigation cameras. Our new Curiosity mosaic was first featured on Saturday at NBC News Cosmic Log by Alan Boyle – while I was hunting for Comet Pan-STARRS.
So the fact that Curiosity is again snapping images and transmitting fresh alien vistas and new science data is a relief to eagerly waiting scientists and engineers here on Earth.
Drilling goes to the heart of the mission. It was absolutely essential to the key finding of Curiosity’s Martian foray thus far – that Mars possesses an environment where alien microbes could once have thrived in the distant past when the Red Planet was warmer and wetter.
Curiosity has found widespread evidence for repeated episodes of flowing liquid water on the floor of her Gale Crater landing site – an essential prerequisite to life as we know it.
After coring and analyzing the first powder ever drilled from the interior of a Martian rock in February 2013, NASA’s Curiosity robot discovered some of the key chemical ingredients necessary to support life on early Mars billions of years ago.
Curiosity found that the fine-grained, sedimentary mudstone rock at the rovers current worksite inside the Yellowknife Bay basin possesses significant amounts of phyllosilicate clay minerals; indicating the flow of nearly neutral liquid water and a habitat friendly to the possible origin of simple Martian life forms eons ago.
The rovers 7 foot (2.1 meter) long robotic arm fed aspirin sized samples of the gray, pulverized powder into the miniaturized CheMin and SAM analytical instruments on Feb. 22 and 23, or Sols 195 and 196. The samples were analyzed on Sol 200 and then the rover experienced her first significant problems since landing on Aug. 5, 2012.
The Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument and Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments test the Martian soil and rock samples to determine their chemical composition and search for traces of organic molecules – the building blocks of life
No organics have been found thus far.
The rover’s science mission has been on hold for nearly a month since “a memory glitch on the A-side computer on Feb. 27, which prompted controllers to command a swap from the A-side computer to the B-side computer,” according to a NASA statement.
“That operator-commanded swap put Curiosity into safe mode for two days. The rover team restored the availability of the A-side as a backup and prepared the B-side to resume full operations.”
The memory issue may have been caused by a cosmic ray strike. The rover suffered another minor setback last week, briefly reentering ‘safe mode’. And in between, a solar storm forced the team to shut Curiosity down for a few more days.
All appears well now.
The next step is to reanalyze those 1st gray rock tailings to continue the hunt for traces of organic molecules.
But the next solar conjunction will interrupt communications starting around April 4 for several weeks. More on that shortly.
After conjunction, Curiosity will resume her drilling campaign
Learn more about Curiosity’s groundbreaking discoveries and NASA missions at Ken’s upcoming lecture presentations:
April 20/21 : “Curiosity and the Search for Life on Mars – (in 3-D)”. Plus Orion, SpaceX, Antares, the Space Shuttle and more! NEAF Astronomy Forum, Suffern, NY
April 28: “Curiosity and the Search for Life on Mars – (in 3-D)”. Washington Crossing State Park, Titusville, NJ, 130 PM
This video taken by Göran Strand from Östersund, Sweden shows what happened on March 17, 2013 when a Coronal Mass Ejection hit Earth’s magnetic field. Two days earlier, sunspot AR1692 had produced a M1-class solar flare that resulted in the CME that hit Earth.
This time lapse from an all-sky camera captures the magnificent sky show between 19:20 and 23:35 UT on the 17th.
Strand said via email that this time lapse consists of 2464 raw images for a total data amount of 30Gb from the 17th. The stunning photo of the Sun is a hydrogen alpha mosaic he made from 10 images that was captured on March 16.
In 1888, astronomer Simon Newcomb uttered now infamous words, stating that “We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.” This was an age just prior to identifying faint nebulae as separate galaxies, Einstein’s theory of special and general relativity, and an era when a hypothetical substance called the aether was said to permeate the cosmos.
Newcomb would scarcely recognize astronomy today. Modern observatories span the electromagnetic spectrum and are unlocking the secrets of a universe both weird and wonderful. Modern day astronomers rarely peer through an eyepiece, were it even possible to do so with such bizarre instruments. What follows are some of the most unique professional ground-based observatories in operation today that are pushing back our understanding of the universe we inhabit.
VERITAS: Based at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in southern Arizona, the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) is an observatory designed to observe high energy gamma-rays. Its array consists of four 12-metre aperture reflectors each comprised of 350 mirror scintillators. Each VERITAS array has a 3.5° degree field of view and the array has been fully operational since 2007. VERITAS has been used to study active galactic nuclei, gamma-ray bursts, and the Crab Nebula pulsar.
IceCube: Not the rapper, IceCube is a neutrino detector in based at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. IceCube watches for neutrino interactions by use of thousands of photomultipliers suspended up to 2.45 kilometres down into the Antarctic ice sheet. With a total of 86 detector strings completed in 2011, IceCube is currently the world’s largest neutrino observatory and is part of the worldwide Supernova Early Warning System. IceCube will also complement WMAP and Planck data and can actually “see” the shadowing effect of the Moon blocking cosmic ray muons.
Liquid Mirror Telescopes: One of the more bizarre optical designs out there in the world of astronomy, liquid mirror telescopes employ a large rotating dish of mercury to form a parabolic mirror. The design is cost effective but does have the slight drawback of having to aim directly at the zenith while a swath of sky passes over head. NASA employed a 3-metre liquid mirror telescope as part of its Orbital Debris observatory based near Cloudcroft, New Mexico from 1995-2002. The largest one in the world (and the 18th largest optical telescope overall) is the 6-metre Large Zenith Telescope in the University of British Columbia’s Malcolm Knapp Research Forest.
LIGO: Designed to detect incoming gravity waves caused by pulsar-black hole mergers, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is comprised of a pair of facilities with one based in Hanford, Washington and another in Livingston, Louisiana. Each detector is consists of a pair of 2 kilometre Fabry-Pérot arms and measures a laser beam shot through them with ultra-high precision. Two geographically separate interferometers are needed to isolate out terrestrial interference as well as give a direction of an incoming gravity wave on the celestial sphere. To date, no gravity waves have been detected by LIGO, but said detection is expected to open up a whole new field of astronomy.
The Very Long Baseline Array: A series of 10 radio telescopes with a resolution the size of a continent, the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) employs observatories across the continental United States, Saint Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Mauna Kea, Hawaii. This is effectively the longest radio interferometer in the world with a baseline of over 8,600 kilometres and a resolution of under one milliarcseconds at 4 to 0.7 centimetre wavelengths. The VLBA has been used to study H2O megamasers in Active Galactic Nuclei and measure ultra-precise positions and proper motions of stars and galaxies.
LOFAR: Located just north of the town of Exloo in the Netherlands, The LOw Frequency Radio Array is a phased array 25,000 antennas with an effective collection area of 300,000 square metres. This makes LOFAR one of the largest single connected radio telescopes in existence. LOFAR is also a proof on concept for its eventual successor, the Square Kilometre Array to be built jointly in South Africa, Australia & New Zealand. Key projects involving LOFAR include extragalactic surveys, research into the nature of cosmic rays and studies of space weather.
The Pierre Auger Observatory: A cosmic ray observatory located in Malargüe, Argentina, the Pierre Auger Observatory was completed in 2008. This unique instrument consists of 1600 water tank Cherenkov radiation detectors spaced out over 3,000 square kilometres along with four complimenting fluorescence detectors. Results from Pierre Auger have thus far included discovery of a possible link between some of the highest energy events observed and active galactic nuclei.
GONG: Keeping an eye on the Sun is the goal of the Global Oscillation Network Group, a worldwide network of six solar telescopes. Established from an initial survey of 15 sites in 1991, GONG provides real-time data that compliments space-based efforts to monitor the Sun by the SDO, SHO, and STEREO A & B spacecraft. GONG scientists can even monitor the solar farside by use of helioseismology!
The Allen Telescope Array: Located at Hat Creek 470 kilometres northeast of San Francisco, this array will eventually consist of 350 Gregorian focus radio antennas that will support SETI’s search for extraterrestrial intelligence. 42 antennas were made operational in 2007, and a 2011 budget shortfall put the status of the array in limbo until a preliminary financing goal of $200,000 was met in August 2011.
The YBJ Cosmic Ray Observatory: Located high on the Tibetan plateau, Yangbajing International Cosmic Ray Observatory is a joint Japanese-Chinese effort. Much like Pierre-Auger, the YBJ Cosmic Ray Observatory employs scintillators spread out along with high speed cameras to watch for cosmic ray interactions. YBJ observes the sky in cosmic rays continuously and has captured sources from the Crab nebula pulsar and found a correlation between solar & interplanetary magnetic fields and the Sun’s own “cosmic ray shadow”. The KOSMA 3-metre radio telescope is also being moved from Switzerland to the YBJ observatory in Tibet.
Last night a bright meteor was spotted up and down the northern mid-Atlantic United States from Maryland to Manhattan to Massachusetts. Streaking across the sky just before 8 p.m. EDT, the fireball was witnessed by thousands — the American Meteor Society alone has so far received over 630 reports on its website from the event. (Update 3/25: The AMS has received now over 1170 reports of the meteor.)
While many false images of the meteor quickly began circulating online, the video above is real — captured from a security camera in Thurmont, MD and uploaded to YouTube by Kim Fox (courtesy of Alan Boyle’s article on NBC News’ Cosmic Log.)
So what’s up with all these meteors lately?
According to NASA meteor specialist Bill Cooke, Friday’s fireball — which has become known as the “Manhattan meteor” — was likely caused by a boulder-sized asteroid about 3 feet (0.9 meters) wide entering Earth’s atmosphere. While bolides of this size sometimes result in meteorites that land on the ground, the last reports of the Manhattan meteor have it miles over the Atlantic… any pieces that survived entry and disintegration probably ended up in the ocean.
Here’s another video of the event from a Massachusetts news station.
And if you’re concerned about an apparent increase in the rate of meteors being spotted around the world, don’t be alarmed. Remember — spring isfireball season, after all.
“We’ve known about this phenomenon for more than 30 years. It’s not only fireballs that are affected. Meteorite falls–space rocks that actually hit the ground–are more common in spring as well.”
– Bill Cooke, NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Center
So keep an eye on the sky over the next few weeks — you never know when we’ll be treated to another show!
How old is the Earth, how long did it take for life to appear, and how long would it take for your hair to grow to the Moon? Find out in this video from MinuteEarth (a new project by MinutePhysics’ Henry Reich):
(Because you always wanted to know how long it would take for your hair to grow to the Moon — admit it.)
And be sure to check out MinuteEarth’s newest video Why Are Leaves Green?Part 1 and Part 2.