Posted on by Ken Kremer

Curiosity Snaps Evocative Self Portrait

Image Cation: Curiosity takes Self Portrait on Sol 32 with the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). Image has been rotated up and enhanced by JPL. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

Curiosity has snapped an evocative new color self-portrait – and it’s totally unique, being the 1st head shot pose, showing the top of the Remote Sensing Mast (RSM).

You’ll notice it’s a bit dusty ! That’s because it was acquired through the transparent dust cover protecting the high resolution Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera positioned on the turret at the end of Curiosity’s 7 foot (2.1 meter) long robotic arm.

The gorgeous new image was taken on Sol 32 (Sept. 7, 2012) with the dust cover closed over the camera lens and thus provides a taste of even more spectacular views yet to come. The picture beautifully shows the Mastcam, Chemcam and Navcam cameras with the rim of Gale Crater in the background.

The MAHLI image above has been enhanced and rotated – to right side up. See the MAHLI raw image below.

The image was taken as JPL engineers were inspecting and moving the arm turret holding MAHLI and the other science instruments and tools and looking back to image them in turn using the Mast’s cameras.

NASA’s mega Martian rover is pausing for about a week or two at this location reached after driving on Sol 29 (Sept. 2) and will thoroughly check out the robotic arm and several science instruments.

So far Curiosity has driven about 358 feet (109 meters) and is sitting roughly 270 feet from the “Bradbury Landing” touchdown spot as the Martian crow flies.

The car sized robot is about a quarter of the way to Glenelg, the destination of her first lengthy science stop where three different types of geologic terrain intersect and are easily accessible for a detailed science survey using all 10 state of the art instruments including the rock drill and soil sampling mechanisms.

Ken Kremer

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

JPL’s Torture Chamber for Spacecraft

The Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity being tested under Martian conditions in JPL’s space simulator on March 8, 2011. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This is a place where engineers inflict all sorts of cruelty. It’s also a National Historic Landmark that is now 50 years old. What is it? The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Space Simulator. While the name sounds like it could be a video game or virtual reality trainer, it actually is the place where spacecraft go to see if they’ve the right stuff to survive the harsh environment in space.

Known as the “25-Foot Space Simulator,” it is capable of producing true interplanetary conditions such as extreme cold, high vacuum, and intense solar radiation that is big enough for most spacecraft to fit inside.

Exterior View of Twenty-Five-Foot Space Simulator, in 1983. Credit: NASA/JPL.

Just like the feared simulations that astronauts go through during training for a spaceflight, where Sim-Sups (Simulation Supervisors) conjure up all sorts of scenarios where everything that can go wrong does, the Space Simulator allows engineers to test the complete spacecraft in its flight configuration for most any type of conditions, searching for any problems imaginable.

Over the years spacecraft tested in this facility include the Ranger, Surveyor, Mariner, and Voyager spacecraft and recently, the Curiosity rover took its turn inside this torture chamber.

Doug Smith from Caltech’s Engineering & Science magazine calls it the Ultimate Evil Tanning Bed — expressly designed to deliver a fatal sunburn to anything placed inside.

The Space Simulator chamber is a stainless-steel cylindrical vessel 8.23 meters (27 feet) in diameter and 26 meters (85 feet) high. The walls and floor are lined with thermally opaque aluminum cryogenic shrouds that can deliver a temperature range of -195° to 93° C ( -320° to +200°F) by liquid or gaseous nitrogen. The solar simulation system consists of an array of 37 xenon 20- to 30-kilowatt compact arc lamps that can produce a variety of beam sizes and intensities. If your spacecraft is going to be seared by the Sun at Mercury or be subject to the freezing temperatures in the Kuiper Belt, this facility can test if every bolt, wire, switch, solder point and component can survive.

Once a spacecraft is put inside the chamber, it takes about 75 minutes to get the conditions to the desired levels, and depending on how quickly the engineers want to see how their spacecraft fared, test conditions can be terminated and access provided to the test item in about 2-1/2 hours.

There’s even a setting for geosynchronous orbit simulation that can test declination angle change and much more, all in a vacuum environment.

The facility’s construction started in 1961 and was completed in 1962 at a cost of $4 million.

The first spacecraft to submit to the torture chamber’s extremes was the Mariner 1 spacecraft that was headed to Venus. It passed the torture chamber’s test, but unfortunately the spacecraft had to be destroyed by a Range Safety officer within minutes after it veered off-course during launch on July 22, 1962 due to a defective signal from the Atlas launch vehicle and a bug in the program equations of the ground-based guiding computer. (The Space Simulator just can’t test for problems like that, regrettably.)

But, JPL had already built an identical spacecraft and Mariner 2 launched a month later on August 27, 1962, sending it on a 3½-month flight to Venus.

In the 50 years the Space Simulator has been in operation, every spacecraft built at JPL has been subject to the torture chamber before heading out to the real torture of the harsh space environment.

“It’s a rare thing when a spacecraft goes into the simulator and the engineers don’t learn something important and modify the design to work better,” saids Andrew Rose, the technical manager for JPL’s Environmental Test Laboratory group.

The Curiosity rover inside the Space Simulator. Credit: NASA/JPL

Over the years, the simulator has been upgraded to provide all sorts of environments, and earlier this year, the Curiosity rover took its turn inside, being sealed in a near-vacuum environment, with temperature cooled to – 130° C (-202 ° F) with the giant light panels simulating the sparse Mars’ sunshine and the various radiation intensities found on Mars.

Even more evils await future spacecraft that will be tested in JPL’s Space Simulator.

This article was updated on 9/8/2012

Sources: Caltech, National Park Service

Posted on by Jason Major

Endeavour to Take to the Skies One Last Time

One of NASA’s 747 SCAs carries Endeavour from Edwards to Kennedy in 2008 following its landing at Edwards to conclude shuttle mission STS-126. (NASA)

Endeavour, mounted atop NASA’s modified 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA), will become the last Space Shuttle orbiter to soar aloft when it departs Monday, Sept. 17, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a three-day flight to Los Angeles International Airport.

In cooperation with the Federal Aviation Administration, the SCA is scheduled to conduct low-level flyovers at about 1,500 feet above many locations along the planned flight path, including Cape Canaveral, Stennis Space Center, New Orleans and stopovers in both Houston and Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Read more about NASA’s SCA: “The World’s Greatest Piggy Back Ride”

Flyovers of Sacramento and San Francisco are also planned before landing at LAX on the 20th.

After arrival at LAX, Endeavour will be demated from the SCA and spend a few weeks at a United Airlines hangar undergoing preparations for transport and display. The orbiter then will travel through Inglewood and Los Angeles city streets on a 12-mile journey from the airport to the California Science Center, arriving on the evening of Oct. 13.

See a map of Endeavour’s planned route across LA here.

Beginning Oct. 30, the shuttle will be on permanent display in the science center’s Samuel Oschin Space Shuttle Endeavour Display Pavilion, beginning its new mission commemorating past achievements in human spaceflight and educating and inspiring future generations of explorers.

On August 16 Endeavour was moved from KSC’s Orbiter Processing Facility 2 to the Vehicle Assembly Building, where it’s being housed temporarily until its departure on the 17th. (Photo above at right; read more here.)

On May 16, 2011, Endeavour launched on its final mission, STS-134:

Completed in July 1990, Endeavour (OV-105) was the last shuttle orbiter to be constructed for NASA. Endeavour completed 25 missions, spent 299 days in orbit, and orbited Earth 4,671 times while traveling 122,883,151 miles.

On Twitter and along Endeavour’s route? NASA encourages people to share their shuttle sightings using the hashtags #spottheshuttle and #OV105, Endeavour’s orbiter vehicle designation.

Read more and find the full flight itinerary on the NASA news release.

Posted on by Jason Major

Is Triton Hiding an Underground Ocean?

Voyager 2 mosaic of Neptune’s largest moon, Triton (NASA)

At 1,680 miles (2,700 km) across, the frigid and wrinkled Triton is Neptune’s largest moon and the seventh largest in the Solar System. It orbits the planet backwards – that is, in the opposite direction that Neptune rotates – and is the only large moon to do so, leading astronomers to believe that Triton is actually a captured Kuiper Belt Object that fell into orbit around Neptune at some point in our solar system’s nearly 4.7-billion-year history.

Briefly visited by Voyager 2 in late August 1989, Triton was found to have a curiously mottled and rather reflective surface nearly half-covered with a bumpy “cantaloupe terrain” and a crust made up of mostly water ice, wrapped around a dense core of metallic rock. But researchers from the University of Maryland are suggesting that between the ice and rock may lie a hidden ocean of water, kept liquid despite estimated temperatures of  -97°C (-143°F), making Triton yet another moon that could have a subsurface sea.

How could such a chilly world maintain an ocean of liquid water for any length of time? For one thing, the presence of ammonia inside Triton would help to significantly lower the freezing point of water, making for a very cold — not to mention nasty-tasting — subsurface ocean that refrains from freezing solid.

In addition to this, Triton may have a source of internal heat — if not several. When Triton was first captured by Neptune’s gravity its orbit would have initially been highly elliptical, subjecting the new moon to intense tidal flexing that would have generated quite a bit of heat due to friction (not unlike what happens on Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io.) Although over time Triton’s orbit has become very nearly circular around Neptune due to the energy loss caused by such tidal forces, the heat could have been enough to melt a considerable amount of water ice trapped beneath Triton’s crust.

Related: Titan’s Tides Suggest a Subsurface Sea

Another possible source of heat is the decay of radioactive isotopes, an ongoing process which can heat a planet internally for billions of years. Although not alone enough to defrost an entire ocean, combine this radiogenic heating with tidal heating and Triton could very well have enough warmth to harbor a thin, ammonia-rich ocean beneath an insulating “blanket” of frozen crust for a very long time — although eventually it too will cool and freeze solid like the rest of the moon. Whether this has already happened or still has yet to happen remains to be seen, as several unknowns are still part of the equation.

“I think it is extremely likely that a subsurface ammonia-rich ocean exists in Triton,” said Saswata Hier-Majumder at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology, whose team’s paper was recently published in the August edition of the journal Icarus. “[Yet] there are a number of uncertainties in our knowledge of Triton’s interior and past which makes it difficult to predict with absolute certainty.”

Still, any promise of liquid water existing elsewhere in large amounts should make us take notice, as it’s within such environments that scientists believe lie our best chances of locating any extraterrestrial life. Even in the farthest reaches of the Solar System, from the planets to their moons, into the Kuiper Belt and even beyond, if there’s heat, liquid water and the right elements — all of which seem to be popping up in the most surprising of places — the stage can be set for life to take hold.

Read more about this here on Astrobiology.net.

Inset image: Voyager 2 portrait of Neptune and Triton taken on August 28, 1989. (NASA)

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Curiosity on the Move! HiRISE Spies Rover Tracks on Mars

The beginning of Curiosity’s journeys. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Yes, the Curiosity rover is on the move, evidenced by the rover tracks seen from above by the outstanding HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. If you look closely, visible are the rover’s wheels and even the camera mast. While this image’s color has been enhanced to show the surface details better, this is still an amazing view of Curiosity’s activities, displaying the incredible resolving power of the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment.

“These are great pictures that help us see context,” said Curiosity mission manager Mike Watkins at a press conference today. “Plus they’re just amazing photos.”

The two “blue” marks (blue is, of course, false color) seen near the site where the rover landed were formed when reddish surface dust was blown away by the rover’s descent stage, revealing darker basaltic sands underneath. Similarly, the tracks appear darker where the rover’s wheels disturbed the top layer of dust.

Below is another great view showing Curiosity’s parachute and backshell in color, highlighting the color variations in the parachute, along with a map of where Curiosity has been and will be going.

Curiosity’s parachute and backshell in color. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Map of Curiosity’s travels so far. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona.

This map shows the route driven by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity overlaid on the HiRISE image, showing where Curiosity has driving through the 29th Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission on Mars, which equals Sept. 4, 2012 here on Earth.

The route starts at Bradbury Landing, Curiosity’s landing site. Numbering of the dots along the line indicate the sol numbers of each drive. North is up. The scale bar is 200 meters (656 feet).

By Sol 29, Curiosity had driven at total of 358 feet (109 meters). While scientists say the rover can travel up to a hundred meters a day, the team has been putting the rover through tests of the robotic arms and other instruments.

The first area of real interest that the team wants to study is the Glenelg area, farther east. The science team said the Glenelg region should provide a good target for Curiosity’s first analysis of powder collected by drilling into a rock.

How long will it take to get to Glenelg? It is about 400 meters away, and the rover is about a quarter of the way there so far.

“If you drove every day and didn’t do the context science it would take a couple of weeks to drive to Glenelg, at 30-40 meters a day,” said Matt Robinson, lead engineer for Curiosity’s robotic arm testing and operations. “But I think we will stop and do the context science. My guess is it will be a few weeks before we get to Glenelg.

The drive to Mt. Sharp, which is about 8 km away, will take much longer, months, maybe even a year.

“If we use our full driving mode and do up to one hundred meters a day, and not stop, it would take about 3 months,” said Robinson, “but we might only be driving for one-half to one-third of the time, it depends on how interesting the terrain is along the way.”

This scene shows the surroundings of the location where NASA Mars rover Curiosity arrived on the 29th Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission on Mars (Sept. 4, 2012). It is a mosaic of images taken by Curiosity’s Navigation Camera (Navcam) following the Sol 29 drive of 100 feet (30.5 meters). Tracks from the drive are visible in the image. For scale, Curiosity leaves parallel tracks about 9 feet (2.7 meters) apart. At this location on Sol 30, Curiosity began a series of activities to test and characterize the rover’s robotic arm and the tools on the arm.

The panorama is centered to the north-northeast, with south-southwest at both ends.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The view of Curiosity’s surroundings is fascinating to both Mars enthusiasts and the scienctists.
Joy Crisp, the deputy project scientist for the mission said two main things have intrigued her. “One is the Mastcam imaging of Mt. Sharp, seeing structures and layers. The other is the amazing rock textures. Some rocks have light-toned grains mixed in a dark matrix. We need to examine rocks like those more thoroughly.”

“That’s what’s been exciting, to see things we haven’t seen before on Mars,” Crisp added.

See more info and larger versions of these images at this NASA webpage.

Posted on by Jason Major

NASA’s Colossal Crawler Gets Souped-Up for SLS

Shuttle Discovery riding one of KSC’s crawler-transporters to Launch Pad 39B in June 2005 (NASA)

One of NASA’s two iconic crawler-transporters — the 2,750-ton monster vehicles that have delivered rockets from Saturns to Shuttles to launch pads at Kennedy Space Center for nearly half a century — is getting an upgrade in preparation for NASA’s new future in space flight.

131 feet long, 113 feet wide and with a breakneck top speed of 2 mph (they’re strong, not fast!) NASA’s colossal crawler-transporters are the only machines capable of hauling fully-fueled rockets the size of office buildings safely between the Vehicle Assembly Building and the launch pads at Kennedy Space Center. Each 3.5-mile one-way trip takes around 6 hours.

Now that the shuttles are retired and each in or destined for its permanent occupation as a relic of human spaceflight, the crawler-transporters have not been doing much crawling or transporting down the 130-foot-wide, Tennessee river-rock-coated lanes at KSC… but that’s soon to change.

According to an article posted Sept. 5 on TransportationNation.org, crawler 2 (CT-2) is getting a 6-million-pound upgrade, bringing its carrying capacity from 12 million pounds to 18 million. This will allow the vehicle to bear the weight of a new generation of heavy-lift rockets, including NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS).

Read: SLS: NASA’s Next Big Thing

In addition to carrying capacity CT-2 will also be getting new brakes, exhausts, hydraulics and computer systems.

Part of a $2 billion plan to upgrade Kennedy Space Center for a future with both NASA and commercial spaceflight partners, the crawler will have two of its onboard power engines replaced — but the original generators that power its eight enormous tread belts will remain, having been thoroughly inspected and deemed to be “in pristine condition” according to the article by Matthew Peddie.

When constructed in the early 1960s, the crawler-transporters were the largest tracked vehicles ever made and cost $14 million — that’s about $100 million today. But were they to be built from scratch now they’d likely cost even more, as the US “is no longer the industrial powerhouse it was in the 1960s.”

Still, it’s good to know that these hardworking behemoths will keep bringing rockets to the pad, even after the shuttles have been permanently parked.

“When they built the crawler, they overbuilt it, and that’s a great thing because it’s able to last all these years. I think it’s a great machine that could last another 50 years if it needed to,” said Bob Myers, systems engineer for the crawler.

You can see some really great full panoramas of the CT-2 at the NASATech website, where photographer John O’Connor took three different panoramic views while the transporter was inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC in Highbay 1. There’s even a pan close-up of the giant cleats that move the transporter.

Read the full article on TransportationNation.org here, and find out more about the crawler-transporters here and here.

Since the Apollo years the transporters have traveled an accumulated 2,526 miles, about the same distance as a one-way highway trip from KSC to Los Angeles.

Inset image: the Apollo 11 Saturn V, tower and mobile launch platform atop the crawler-transporter during rollout on May 20, 1969. (NASA) Bottom image: NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on the site of the CT-2 upgrade in August 2012. Each of the crawler’s 456 tread shoes weighs about one ton. (NASA)

Posted on by Jenny Winder

A Jodrell Odyssey – Part 1 – The Discovery Centre

Caption: The Lovell Telescope from The Discovery Centre Cafe. Credit: Howard Barlow for the University of Manchester

Ever get the feeling you are being watched? Visit Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, England and that feeling is doubled and intensified by two inescapable presences. First there is the vast 76 meter Lovell Telescope that dominates the site and the second is the spirit of the man who built it.

Sir Bernard Lovell came to Jodrell Bank in 1945, looking for a place away from the city, where the trams were interfering with the research he was carrying out into cosmic rays at the University of Manchester and it was here that he built his observatory. From the beginning he wanted to engage people with the work he was doing and the telescope he was building, that locals called “Lovell’s Contraption”. That dedication to public engagement and education continues to this day.

The new Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre opened in April 2011 and is watched over by the Director, Dr Teresa Anderson who studied for her physics degree at Manchester, took her PhD at the University of Edinburgh before returning to Jodrell to develop and build the new Centre. She is a woman who can stretch a budget till it squeals. She has managed to take the modest funds allocated to her and create an innovative, imaginative experience for visitors. Teresa is rightly proud of the site’s accessibility as well as its policy of using green energy.

She also has a wonderful eye for detail. The entrance to the Planet Pavilion is decorated with an embossed depiction of the 408 Mhz (radio continuum) map of the Milky Way. This building houses the gift shop and an inviting Cafe based on the theme of time. An array of different clocks on the wall show the passage of time on Earth, Venus (retrograde) Mars, Jupiter and a black hole. On the opposite wall is a timeline showing how far into the past we travel when viewing objects from Earth, one and a half seconds back in time when looking at the Moon, 8 minutes to the Sun and on back to the Big Bang. The glass doors give a stunning view of the Lovell telescope and open onto an outdoor dining area.

The reception area houses a display about the Lovell telescope and here staff post the latest astronomy related news bulletins, there is also a receiver that used to be installed on the Lovell which is currently on loan to the Centre. The cryogenic system used in receiver has to be cooled down to minus 260 degrees Celsius to reduce thermal noise from the receiver itself and engineers have just 20 minutes to get it up to the focus tower at the top of the dish and installed before is heats up.

Caption: Visitors at the Planet Pavilion. Credit: Howard Barlow for the University of Manchester.

A starlit passage echoing with the voices of Sir Bernard Lovell and Neil Armstrong leads you to a room where an early image of the CMB from the Planck mission is colourfully displayed around the walls (Jodrell constructed some low noise amplifiers for the mission) with a collection of touchscreen information points below that allow visitors to take part in quizzes and learn more. A beautiful clockwork orrery in the centre of the room has the IAU constellation maps including the 13 zodiac constellations (including Ophiuchus) which Teresa says, with a wry smile, causes some controversy with people who believe in astrology.

Outside is dominated by the Lovell Telescope. All the pathways are wheelchair and pushchair friendly and information boards are dotted along the circular pathway surrounding the dish giving information about the site, the telescope and the work it does. An acrylic sculpture of the Sun at the foot of the Lovell marks the centre of the Spaced Out project, the world’s largest scale model of the Solar System that stretches across the UK from Cornwall to the Shetland Isles.

The Space Pavilion’s glass front is adorned with Pulsar trace and is home to a wonderful hands-on science centre where you can print out a souvenir trace of what the Lovell is observing live or listen to the sound of the Big Bang, or touch a meteorite. There is a nice interactive touchscreen that introduces you to some of the people who work at the site and lets you ask them questions, an exhibit that explores the invisible universe of the different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum and a film pod that runs science animations as well as archive film of Jodrell’s history. The building is also the heart of the year round education programmes that offer children of all ages, a unique learning experience and opportunity to experiment with live science. There is a flexible space that can be used as a lecture hall or host events and is home to the popular Ask a Scientist sessions and where an inflatable planetarium can be erected for visiting groups.

Caption: Space Pavilion at The Discovery Centre. Credit: Howard Barlow for the University of Manchester.

Outside again there are 35 acres of gardens to explore, including the newly opened Galaxy Garden designed by TV gardener Chris Beardshaw with willow spirals, island flowerbeds planted to illustrate astronomical themes such as light or star formation, a meadow with over 70 species of native wildflowers and a chalk depiction of our spiral galaxy craved into a hillside. The arboretum was created by Sir Bernard Lovell, also an internationally renowned arboriculturist, and contains 2,000 species of trees and shrubs.

There is a planet path and children can borrow backpacks that contain a map, instructions and activities they can try at each planet on the way. One of the outdoor exhibits always popular and crawling with children are the Whispering Dishes that have been kept from the original centre. This reusing of resources is very much a tradition at Jodrell, The motors used to move the Lovell scope were taken from two battleships HMS Revenge and Royal Sovereign, and a supermarket till receipt dispenser is now used to print out the live trace from the telescope.

Teresa is very keen to encourage more people to enjoy astronomy, and they host spectacular rock concerts featuring bands such as Flaming Lips and Elbow, against the backdrop of the Lovell scope with a surrounding science fair. Jodrell is also the home to the very popular, annual Stargazing Live series for BBC TV, three nights of live astronomy programmes hosted by Prof. Brian Cox and Dara O’Briain. The Centre is always keen to encourage more girls and women to become involved in physics and astronomy. Currently Teresa is overseeing The Girls Night Out (under the stars) on Sat 27th October 2012 being planned by her team, with talks by female astrophysicists, a chance to see Moon rocks under a microscope and they can also enjoy cocktails and cupcakes alongside the telescopes.

Over tea outside the Cafe, Teresa talked fondly of Sir Bernard and his vision and close involvement and support both of the Centre, and of Teresa herself. He will be sadly missed by everyone at Jodrell. She is justly proud that she was the principal author of the proposal that led to the Department of Culture Media and Sport including Jodrell Bank on the UK’s list for World Heritage Site Status. She gets a very determined look in her eye that I’m sure the funding committee knows well, when she talks of her many plans for future displays, projects and exhibits. I think Sir Bernard’s legacy is in safe hands.

(Part 2 of Jodrell Odyssey will go behind the scenes in a full, privileged access tour of this cutting-edge science facility)

Find out more about the Discovery Centre here

Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

See Armstrong’s Hands and Eyes on the Moon

You see those gloves? Those gloves grasped the lunar ladder as Neil Armstrong hopped down to the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969. Tinged with blue silicon rubber fingertips to help Armstrong feel his way, those gloves carried experiments, and tools, and touched Moon dust. They were the first gloves used while walking on the Moon.

They’ve been in storage for more than a decade. But right now — for at least the next two weeks — they are sitting in a special display case at the Smithsonian’s airport annex in Washington. The National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is showing them to the public in honour of Armstrong, who died at the age of 82 on Aug. 25.

Oh yeah, and you can also check out the helmet that Neil Armstrong used as he described the lunar surface to millions of awe-struck listeners on live television. (The gold-plated visor he used on the surface is not being lowered again due to concerns about damaging it, but it’s inside the helmet.) No big deal.

Yes, the surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.

This is probably your last chance to catch these artifacts before at least 2017. Armstrong’s spacesuit has been in storage since 2001 in a special temperature and humidity-controlled facility, to protect it from damage. The museum has tentative plans to display it again when it renovates the Apollo gallery in the main museum building on the Washington Mall. That said, his crewmate Buzz Aldrin’s spacesuit is on display there right now.

Photos by Dane Penland, courtesy of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Comet Pan-STARRS: How Bright Will it Get?

Comet PanSTARRS on September 4, 2012 as seen from Puerto Rico. Credit: Efrain Morales/Jaicoa Observatory.

Early next year, a comet will come fairly close to Earth and the Sun — traveling within the orbit of Mercury — and it has the potential to be visible to the naked eye. Amateur and professional astronomers alike have been keeping watch on Comet C/2011 L4 PanSTARRS (or PanSTARRS for short), trying to ascertain just how bright this comet may become. It will come within 45 million kilometers (28 million miles) of the Sun on March 9, 2013, which is close enough for quite a bit of cometary ice to vaporize and form a bright coma and tail.

But just how bright, no one can say for sure. Comets have been known to be very unpredictable (remember the breakup of Comet Elenin?) but some estimates have said this comet could become a naked-eye object, as bright as Vega or Arcturus next March.

Right now it is at about Magnitude 12, and skywatchers in the southern hemisphere observers will have a great view as this comet gets closer and brighter, as it will remain high in the sky. But right now, skywatchers in the northern latitudes are saying farewell to Comet PANSTARRS, as it becomes low on the horizon. Astrophotographer Efrain Morales from Puerto Rico took the image above on September 4th, 2012 at 00:31 UTC. “It was very difficult to image due to the forest tree tops and sunset light but I was able to capture it at high magnification,” Efrain told us. (He used an LX200ACF 12 inch, OTA, CGE mount, F10, ST402xmi Ccd, Astronomik Ir/UV filter at 2 minutes. )

Observers in the mid-northern latitudes won’t be able to see the comet again until after its perihelion, unfortunately. And after that, we may never see Comet PanSTARRS again.

The discovery of the comet was made in June 2011 with the 1.8 meter (70.7 inch) Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System or Pan-STARRS telescope on Mount Haleakala. PanSTARRS is looking to image the entire sky several times a month to hunt for Earth-approaching comets and asteroids that could pose a danger to our planet.

Richard Wainscoat and graduate student Marco Micheli confirmed the object was a comet using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea.

“The comet has an orbit that is close to parabolic,” Wainscoat said, “meaning that this may be the first time it will ever come close to the Sun, and that it may never return.”

Astronomers at the PanSTARRS telescope say that making brightness predictions for new comets is difficult because astronomers do not know how much ice they contain. Because sublimation of ice (conversion from solid to gas) is the source of cometary activity and a major contributor to a comet’s overall eventual brightness, this means that more accurate brightness predictions will not be possible until the comet becomes more active as it approaches the sun and astronomers get a better idea of how icy it is.

It will be an adventure to follow the comet’s close approach, and we hope our readers and astrophotographers in the southern hemisphere will keep us posted!

See our previous article about this comet.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Huge Eruption on the Sun Revisited in Spectacular HD

This one may truly knock your socks off. Remember the spectacular filament eruption on the Sun on August 31 that we posted last week? The folks from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio now have put out a video of the eruption in high definition, and it is definitely worth watching to witness the awesome power of the Sun. The new video also includes data from STEREO and SOHO — as well as the data from the Solar Dynamics Observatory — so the tremendous Coronal Mass Ejection is visible as it travels outward from the Sun. Wow.

Below is an image of the filament eruption that includes a scale model of Earth. As the @NASAGoddard Twitter feed posted: “Reason #1 why it’s a REALLY good thing that the sun is 93,000,000 miles 150 million km) from Earth…. [mind blowing photo]”

The image above includes an image of Earth to show the size of the filament eruption compared to the size of Earth. Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO

Thanks to Scott Wiessinger and the Scientific Visualization Studio for the great video and images.