Posted on by Fraser Cain

Virtual Star Party – Nov. 4, 2012: The Blue Snowball Edition

Another fantastic Virtual Star Party, with 5 telescopes revealing an amazing view of the night sky. We saw several favorite objects, like Andromeda, the Elephant Trunk Nebula, the Heart and Soul Nebulae, the Double Cluster in Perseus, and the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules. Mighty Jupiter made an appearance right at the end, and we saw several new objects, including the Blue Snowball Nebula, and a collection of little star clusters.

I highly recommend you check out the Event page for this episode. There are dozens of great pictures posted from the event for your viewing enjoyment.

Astronomers: Gary Gonella, Bill McLaughlin, Roy Salisbury, Stuart Forman, and Chris Ridgway

Commentary: Dr. Thad Szabo

Host: Fraser Cain

Pinwheel Nebula by Gary Gonella


Jupiter by Chris Ridgway

Blue Snowball Nebula by Stuart Forman

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Spectacular 360-Degree 3-D Panorama from Apollo 16

Dealing with those who think the Apollo Moon landings never happened can be frustrating. Most of us just throw up our hands in exasperation, but Italian amateur astronomer Roberto Beltramini came up with a better idea: create a full 360-degree 3-D panorama of images from Apollo 16 to show “the true depth of the views taken by astronauts Apollo,” he said. “What better proof? This was the motivation that prompted me to start, but the spectacle and the interest in new ways of seeing the [Moon’s] wilderness, made me go farther.”

This panorama has now been put into a “Zoomify” making it fully interactive and lots of fun to explore. Grab your 3-D glasses, and you can find a rock and zoom in, follow the astronauts’ footprints and see one of the astronauts tinkering with the Lunar Rover. Click here and enjoy!

Beltramini’s initial plan was to create just a few 3-D anaglyghs, but once he got started, he just kept going. But of course, the Apollo 16 images taken by astronauts John Young and Charlie Duke as they walked, bounded and drove the lunar rover on the Moon’s surface were not originally taken with the intent to be made into 3-D view, making Beltramini’s job fairly difficult.

“The difficulty of making anaglyph, due to the shots not performed specifically for the purpose, may have dampened the attempts of other enthusiasts,” he writes on the website for amateur astronomy group in Viareggio, in the Tuscany region of Italy (Gruppo Astronomico Viareggio.) “To overcome this obstacle, I had to work adapting the pairs of pictures with graphics programs, cropping, resizing, by cleaning scratches and stains present because of the scans on the original story. Other marks are very annoying problem, that is, the black crosses placed at regular intervals in photographs taken during the Apollo missions that I had to delete one by one to avoid that interfere with 3D viewing.”

But over time he figured out how to make it work, “thanks to the phenomenon of rotation around a nodal point during the panning of the Apollo missions is possible, if there is plenty of overlap of the images, create a 3D 360 degree panorama,” he told Universe Today.

Apollo 16 was the fourth mission to land on the moon and launched on July 26, 1971, and the astronauts returned to Earth on August 7. Find out more about Apollo 16 here.

Posted on by Jason Major

Cassini Discovers Titan’s Glowing Atmosphere

A pair of images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft show Titan glowing in the dark.

Titan never ceases to amaze. Saturn’s largest moon, it’s wrapped in a complex, multi-layered nitrogen-and-methane atmosphere ten times thicker than Earth’s. It has seasons and weather, as evidenced by the occasional formation of large bright clouds and, more recently, an area of open-cell convection forming over its south pole. Titan even boasts the distinction of being the only other world in the Solar System besides Earth with large amounts of liquid existing on its surface, although there in the form of exotic methane lakes and streams.

We have NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to thank for these discoveries, and now there’s one more for the ceaseless explorer to add to its list: Titan glows in the dark.

Seen above in two versions of the same calibrated raw image, acquired by Cassini on May 7, 2009, Titan hovers in front of a background field of stars which appear as blurred streaks due to the 560 seconds (about 9 1/2 minutes) exposure time and the relative motion of the spacecraft.

The image on the left shows Titan in visible light, receiving reflected sunlight off Saturn itself — “Saturnshine” — while the moon was on the ringed planet’s night side. The image on the right was processed to exclude this reflected light… and yet it still shines. (E pur si candeo?)

Read: Titan’s Surface “the Consistency of Soft, Damp Sand”

The hazy moon’s dim glow — measuring only around a millionth of a watt — comes from not only the top of its atmosphere (which was expected) but also from much deeper within, at altitudes of 300 km (190 miles).

The glow is created by chemical reactions within Titan’s atmosphere, sparked by interactions with charged particles from the Sun and Saturn’s magnetic field.

“It turns out that Titan glows in the dark – though very dimly,” said Robert West, the lead author of a recent study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and a Cassini imaging team scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It’s a little like a neon sign, where electrons generated by electrical power bang into neon atoms and cause them to glow. Here we’re looking at light emitted when charged particles bang into nitrogen molecules in Titan’s atmosphere.”

The light is analogous to the airglow seen in Earth’s atmosphere, often photographed by astronauts aboard the ISS.

Still, even taking known sources of external radiation into account, Titan is glowing from within with an as-yet-unexplained light. More energetic cosmic rays may be to blame, penetrating deeper into the moon’s atmosphere, or there could be unexpected chemical reactions or phenomena at work — a little Titanic lightning, perhaps?

“This is exciting because we’ve never seen this at Titan before,” West said. “It tells us that we don’t know all there is to know about Titan and makes it even more mysterious.”

Read more on the Cassini mission page here, and see more images from Cassini on the CICLOPS imaging center site.

Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute. Inset image: Titan’s atmosphere and upper-level hydrocarbon haze, seen in June 2012. Color composite by J. Major.

Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

‘Chasing Atlantis’ Film Launches Fundraising Campaign

A member of the Chasing Atlantis film team captures Atlantis during its last journey to the Kennedy Space Center in November 2012.

A member of the Chasing Atlantis film team captures Atlantis during its last journey to a display at the Kennedy Space Center in November 2012. (Matthew Cimone)

The team behind Chasing Atlantis, an upcoming film talking about the legacy of the space shuttle program, is asking the public for help funding the post-production.

This weekend, the five Canadians involved in the production opened an IndieGoGo campaign online to crowdsource $15,000 from the masses. (IndieGoGo is a similar service to Kickstarter, but unlike Kickstarter, it accepts banking information from outside of the United States.)

“We’ve gone from a small road trip doc to sitting before astronauts like Chris Hadfield, and now actors such as Wil Wheaton,” wrote team member Matthew Cimone in a statement sent to Universe Today.

“The whole film, to date, has been completely self funded, but to assist in the final post-production push, we are launching an IndieGoGo campaign.”

The team says the money is not supposed to recover the whole cost of the project, but just the final stages of it. They plan to use the money for additional on-location shooting as well as post-production costs such as sound design, colour grading, research assistance and an original score.

You can view the fundraising campaign here. Potential contributors have until Dec. 17 to donate, and the team will receive all of the money donated even if they do not reach their goal.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Hurricanes, Transporters and Grand Openings: Busy Week for Retired Space Shuttles

Atlantis is seen in the Vehicle Assembly Building Highbay 4 for the last time before she was rolled to her final home at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Center. Credit: John O’Connor/nasatech.net

Last week was a busy one for the retired space shuttles, and here’s a gallery of images of what’s been happening lately: Atlantis was the last shuttle ever to be in the Vehicle Assembly Building, and was transported over to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex this weekend where it will be put on permanent display. Last week the California Science center’s Samuel Oschin Space Shuttle Endeavour Display Pavilion officially opened, And unfortunately, shuttle Enterprise suffered some damage during Hurricane Sandy.

Enterprise damaged during Hurricane Sandy. Credit: AP

Enterprise, which is now at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City sustained minor damage to its tail (a.k.a vertical stabilizer), after the fabric pavilion that protected the shuttle was torn by winds. A top piece of the tail came off, said a museum spokesperson. Enterprise will be repaired at the earliest opportunity, the Intrepid museum said, and also the rest of the museum remains closed because of storm damage.

“Enterprise remains safely in place and partially covered by the fabric of the damaged pavilion, which was left in place as a protective measure,” said museum director Susan Marenoff-Zausner.

Enterprise never flew in space but was used for atmospheric drop tests. It was formerly at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington D.C., was switched out for shuttle Discovery — the only shuttle to not have any action last week, except for the thousands of visitors that regularly visit her.

Space shuttle Atlantis is transported along Kennedy Parkway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on its 10-mile journey to the Kennedy Visitor Complex where it will be put on public display. Credit: NASA/Tony Gray

Space shuttle workers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, watch as the space shuttle Atlantis is transported to the Kennedy Visitor Complex. Credit: NASA/Tony Gray

Flag waving children welcome space shuttle Atlantis as it approaches Space Florida’s Exploration Park. Credit: NASA/ Tony Gray

If you’d like to see some awesome high-resolution full panoramas of Atlantis in the VAB, check out this page at the nasatech.net website.

Guest walk around space shuttle Endeavour after the grand opening ceremony for the California Science center’s Samuel Oschin Space Shuttle Endeavour Display Pavilion, Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012, in Los Angeles. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Endeavour’s Grand Opening Ceremony. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

SpaceX’s 10-Story Re-useable Grasshopper Rocket Takes a Bigger Hop

SpaceX is developing the “Grasshopper” reusable vertical takeoff, vertical landing rocket. Back in September, the 32-meter- (106-ft-) tall Grasshopper made a tiny hop – barely lifting off the pad just to test-fire its engines. But now the Grasshopper has made a second, bigger hop. Over the weekend, Elon Musk quietly tweeted a link to a video, saying, “First flight of 10 story tall Grasshopper rocket using closed loop thrust vector & throttle control.” Update: SpaceX later confirmed that the Grasshopper rose “17.7 feet (5.4 meters), hovered, and touched back down safely on the pad at SpaceX’s rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas.”

SpaceX hasn’t talked much about this rocket, but reportedly the goal with Grasshopper is to eventually create a reusable first stage for its Falcon 9 rocket, which would be able to land safely instead of falling back into the ocean and not being usable again.

Artist’s rendering of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket landing itself. Credit: SpaceX

Here’s some info about the Grasshopper from a draft environmental impact assessment put out by the FAA in 2011:

The Grasshopper RLV consists of a Falcon 9 Stage 1 tank, a Merlin-1D engine, four steel landing legs, and a steel support structure. Carbon overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs), which are filled with either nitrogen or helium, are attached to the support structure. The Merlin-1D engine has a maximum thrust of 122,000 pounds. The overall height of the Grasshopper RLV is 106 feet, and the tank height is 85 feet.

The propellants used in the Grasshopper RLV include a highly refined kerosene fuel, called RP-1, and liquid oxygen (LOX) as the oxidizer.

The reports goes on to say that the Grasshopper test program is to have three phases of test launches, at SpaceX’s facility in McGregor, Texas. Phases 1 and 2 would consist of very low test fires with the rocket rising to not more than 73 meters (240 feet) during Phase 1 and 204 meters (670 feet), which is below controlled-airspace. Both Phase 1 and 2 flights would last up to 45 seconds.

Phase 3 tests have the goal of increasingly higher altitudes with higher ascent speeds and descent speeds. The altitude test sequence likely would be 366 meters (1,200 feet); 762 meters (2,500 feet); 1,524 meters (5,000 feet); 2,286 meters (7,500 feet); and 3,505 meters (11,500) feet. The maximum test duration would be approximately 160 seconds. If all goes well, the Grasshopper would land back on the launch pad.

Here’s Grasshopper’s first little test hop in September, which SpaceX said went 2 meters (6 feet):

Look for more details on this exciting reusable rocket as SpaceX continues its tests of the Grasshopper.

Sources: Twitter, Parabolic Arc

Posted on by Fraser Cain

You Need Just the Right Amount of Killer Asteroids to Promote Complex Life

Different kinds of asteroid belts
Different kinds of asteroid belts


An artist’s impression of the different configurations of asteroid belts that could occur. Image credit: NASA/ESA/A. Feild, STScI

Sure, asteroids can be planetary annihilators, scouring the surface of a world with fire and molten rock. But asteroids might also help seed a planet with the right ingredients to set up the conditions for life, and give that life encouragement to evolve more complex survival strategies.

As with all things, it’s just about balance. Too many asteroids, and you’ve got an unrelenting cosmic shooting gallery, raining fiery death from above. Too few asteroids, and complex life might not get the raw material it needs to get rolling. Life never gets that opportunity to really shake things up and evolve into more complex forms.

This conclusion comes from Rebecca Martin, a NASA Sagan Fellow from the University of Colorado in Boulder and Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. The researchers created a series of theoretical models based on observations of debris disks around other stars, as well as the Jupiter-sized planets discovered so far.

They found that only a fraction of the planetary systems out there have giant planets at the right locations to help create an asteroid belt of the right size. In fact, it looks like the Solar System might be rare and special when it comes to perfectly-sized asteroid belts.

“Our study shows that only a tiny fraction of planetary systems observed to date seem to have giant planets in the right location to produce an asteroid belt of the appropriate size, offering the potential for life on a nearby rocky planet,” said Martin, the study’s lead author. “Our study suggests that our solar system may be rather special.”

There are three potential models for asteroid belt formation in other star systems.

  1. A Jupiter-sized world migrates slowly inward, disrupting the asteroid belt before it can really form. All the potential asteroids are consumed or flung out into deep space. A potential Earthlike world is deprived of the chemicals (and catastrophic incentive) to evolve complex lifeforms. That’s bad
  2. No large Jupiter-sized world forms at all, allowing the solar system to create a massive asteroid belt. Material from this enormous asteroid belt would be too punishing to Earthlike worlds for complex life to stand a chance. Also bad.
  3. A Jupiter-sized world forms in the outer solar system, and only moves in a little, preventing an overly large asteroid belt from forming. There are still enough asteroids out there to seed an Earthlike world with chemicals and evolutionary encouragement, but not enough to set its progress back. That’s us!

To come to this conclusion, Martin and Livio created models of protoplanetary disks around various stars, and then watched what would happen with various Jupiter-sized planets. They compared their models to 90 protoplanetary disks that have been discovered so far by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and 520 giant planets found orbiting other stars.

So far, only 4% of the systems they’ve observed have the right combination of a compact asteroid belt with a Jupiter-sized planet nearby. This gives researchers a very specific configuration of asteroid belt and planetary arrangement to look for when searching for worlds that could contain complex life.

Original Source: NASA News Release

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Rare Supernova Pair are Most Distant Ever

High-resolution simulation of a galaxy hosting a super-luminous supernova and its chaotic environment in the early Universe. Credit: Adrian Malec and Marie Martig (Swinburne University)

Some of the earliest stars were massive and short-lived, destined to end their lives in huge explosions. Astronomers have detected some of the earliest and most distant of these exploding stars, called ‘super-luminous’ supernovae — stellar explosions 10–100 times brighter than other supernova types. The duo sets a record for the most distant supernova yet detected, and offers clues about the very early Universe.

“The light of these supernovae contains detailed information about the infancy of the Universe, at a time when some of the first stars are still condensing out of the hydrogen and helium formed by the Big Bang,” said Dr. Jeffrey Cooke, an astrophysicist from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, whose team made the discovery.

The team used a combination of data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and the Keck 1 Telescope, both located in Hawaii.

“The type of supernovae we’ve found are extremely rare,” Cooke said. “In fact, only one has been discovered prior to our work. This particular type of supernova results from the death of a very massive star (about 100 – 250 times the mass of our Sun) and explodes in a completely different way compared to other supernovae. Discovering and studying these events provides us with observational examples to better understand them and the chemicals they eject into the Universe when they die.”

Super-luminous supernovae were discovered only a few years ago, and are rare in the nearby Universe. Their origins are not well understood, but a small subset of them are thought to occur when extremely massive stars, 150 to 250 times more massive than our Sun, undergo a nuclear explosion triggered by the conversion of photons into electron-positron pairs. This process is completely different compared to all other types of supernovae. Such events are expected to have occurred more frequently in the early Universe, when massive stars were more common.

This, and the extreme brightness of these events, encouraged Cooke and colleagues to search for super-luminous supernovae at redshifts, z, greater than 2, when the Universe was less than one-quarter of its present age.

“We used LRIS (Low Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) on Keck I to get the deep spectroscopy to confirm the host redshifts and to search for late-time emission from the supernovae,” Cooke said. “The initial detections were found in the CFHT Legacy Survey Deep fields. The light from the supernovae arrived here on Earth 4 to 6 years ago. To confirm their distances, we need to get a spectrum of their host galaxies which are very faint because of their extreme distance. The large aperture of Keck and the high sensitivity of LRIS made this possible. In addition, some supernovae have bright enough emission features that persist for years after they explode. The deep Keck spectroscopy is able to detect these lines as a further means of confirmation and study.”

Cooke and co-workers searched through a large volume of the Universe at z greater than or equal to 2, and found two super-luminous supernovae, at redshifts of 2.05 and 3.90 — breaking the previous supernova redshift record of 2.36, and implying a production rate of super-luminous supernovae at these redshifts at least 10 times higher than in the nearby Universe. Although the spectra of these two objects make it unlikely that their progenitors were among the first generation of stars, the present results suggest that detection of those stars may not be far from our grasp.

Detecting the first stars allows us much greater understanding of the first stars in the Universe, Cooke said.

“Shortly after the Big Bang, there was only hydrogen and helium in the Universe,” he said. “All the other elements that we see around us today, such as carbon, oxygen, iron, and silicon, were manufactured in the cores of stars or during supernova explosions. The first stars to form after the Big Bang laid the framework for the long process of enriching the Universe that eventually produced the diverse set of galaxies, stars, and planets we see around us today. Our discoveries probe an early time in the Universe that overlaps with the time we expect to see the first stars.”

Sources: Keck Observatory, Nature

Posted on by Jenny Winder

Huge New ESA Tracking Station is Ready for Duty

Caption: ESA’s giant Malargüe tracking station Credits: ESA/S. Marti

To keep in contact with an ever growing armada of spacecraft ESA has developed a tracking station network called ESTRACK. This is a worldwide system of ground stations providing links between satellites in orbit and ESA’s Operations Control Centre (ESOC) located in Darmstadt, Germany. The core ESTRACK network comprises 10 stations in seven countries. Major construction has now been completed on the final piece of this cosmic jigsaw, one of the world’s most sophisticated satellite tracking stations at Malargüe, Argentina, 1000 km west of Buenos Aires.

ESA’s Core Network comprises 10 ESTRACK stations: Kourou (French Guiana), Maspalomas, Villafranca (Spain), Redu (Belgium), Santa Maria (Portugal), Kiruna (Sweden), Perth (Australia) which host 5.5-, 13-, 13.5- or 15-metre antennas. The new tracking station (DSA3) at Malargüe in Argentina, joins two other 35-metre deep-space antennas at New Norcia (DSA1) in Australia (completed in 2002) and Cebreros (DSA2) in Spain, (completed in 2005) to form the European Deep Space Network.

The essential task of ESTRACK stations is to communicate with missions, up-linking commands and down-linking scientific data and spacecraft status information. The tracking stations also gather radiometric data to tell mission controllers the location, trajectory and velocity of their spacecraft, to search for and acquire newly launched spacecraft, in addition to auto-tracking, frequency and timing control using atomic clocks and gathering atmospheric and weather data.

Deep-space missions can be over 2 million kilometres away from the Earth. Communicating at such distances requires highly accurate mechanical pointing and calibration systems. The 35m stations provide the improved range, radio technology and data rates required to send commands, receive data and perform radiometric measurements for current and next-generation exploratory missions such as Mars Express, Venus Express, Rosetta, Herschel, Planck, Gaia, BepiColombo, ExoMars, Solar Orbiter and Juice.

DSA3 is located at 1500m altitude in the clear Argentinian desert air, this and ultra-low-temperature amplifiers installed at the station, have meant that performance has exceeded expectations. The first test signals were received in June 2012 from Mars Express, over a distance of about 193 million km, proving that the station’s technology is ready for duty.

“Initial in-service testing with the Malargüe station shows excellent results.” “Our initial in-service testing with the Malargüe station shows excellent results,” says Roberto Maddè, ESA’s project manager for DSA 3 construction. “We have been able to quickly and accurately acquire signals from ESA and NASA spacecraft, and our station is performing better than specified.”

All three tracking stations are also equipped for radio science, which studies how matter, such as planetary atmospheres, affects the radio waves as they pass through. This can provide important information on the atmospheric composition of Mars, Venus or the Sun.

The tracking capability of all three ESA deep space stations also work in cooperation with partner agencies such as NASA and Japan’s JAXA, helping to boost science data return for all. The three Deep Space Antenna can be linked to the 7 stations comprising the Core Network as well as five other stations making up the larger Augmented Network and eleven additional stations that make up a global Cooperative Network with other space agencies from around the world.

Now that major construction is complete, teams are preparing DSA 3 for hand-over to operations, formal inauguration late this year and entry in routine service early in 2013.

Find out more about Malargüe and the Deep Space Antenna here and the other ESTRACK tracking stations here

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

The Curiosity Rover’s Ultimate Self-Portrait

The Curiosity rover self portrait. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

OK, we thought the low-resolution self-portrait from yesterday was great… but here’s the real goods: a monster, high-resolution awesome mosaic of 55 images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), showing the rover at its spot in Gale Crater — called Rocknest — with the base of Gale Crater’s 5-kilometer- (3-mile-) high mountain, Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp, rising in the background. The images were taken on Sol 84 (Oct. 31, 2012), and sent to Earth today. In the foreground, four scoop scars can be seen in the regolith in front of the rover. As we mentioned about the previous MAHLI mosaic, the arm was moved for each of the 55 images, so the arm and the camera doesn’t show up, just like any photographer behind the camera (or their arms) isn’t visible in a photograph.

You can get access to the full resolution version at this link. It’s amazing.

But that’s not all…

NASA says that self-portraits like this one document the state of the rover and allow mission engineers to track changes over time, such as dust accumulation and wheel wear. Due to its location on the end of the robotic arm, only MAHLI (among the rover’s 17 cameras) is able to image some parts of the craft, including the port-side wheels.

Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Blog talks about the projection issue, where the wheel closest to the front looks big and distorted. That’s a factor of the camera angle and Emily mentions a discussion of this is taking place by the image wizards over at Unmanned Spaceflight , if you want to see the various ways to deal with this issue.

Emily also points out how the rover photographed itself photographing itself — due to the reflective surfaces on the turret, so check out her analysis.

You can always see the raw images coming in from Curiosity at this NASA website.

But the other cool thing is that another whole set of images was taken from a slightly different angle, which means only one thing: 3-D! Here’s Stu Atkinson’s first quick attempt:

There will surely be some refinements of the 3-D version, but enjoy this one for now!