Posted on by Jason Major

Spitzer Spots Two Galaxies in One

Infrared imaging of the Sombrero Galaxy (M104) reveals both elliptical and disk structures.

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The Sombrero galaxy has a split personalty, according to recent observations by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Infrared imaging has revealed a hazy elliptical halo of stars enveloping a dual-structured inner disk; before this, the Sombrero galaxy was thought to be only disk-shaped.

Spitzer’s heat-seeking abilities reveal both stars and dust within the Sombrero galaxy, also known as Messier 104 and NGC 4594. The starlight detected at 3.5 and 4.6 microns is represented in blue-green while the dust imaged at 8.0 microns is shown in red.

In addition, Spitzer discerned that the flat disk within the galaxy is made up of two sections — an inner disk composed almost entirely of stars with no dust, and an outer ring containing both dust and stars.

The galaxy’s dual personality couldn’t be so clearly seen in previous visible-light images.

Hubble image of M104. (NASA/The Hubble Heritage Team STScl/AURA)

“The Sombrero is more complex than previously thought,” said Dimitri Gadotti of the European Southern Observatory in Chile and lead author of the report. “The only way to understand all we know about this galaxy is to think of it as two galaxies, one inside the other.”

Although it might seem that the Sombrero is the result of a collision between two separate galaxies, that’s actually not thought to be the case. Such an event would have destroyed the disk structure that’s seen today; instead, it’s thought that the Sombrero accumulated a lot of extra gas billions of years ago when the Universe was populated with large clouds of gas and dust. The extra gas fell into orbit around the galaxy, eventually spinning into a flattened disk and forming new stars.

This is one of the first galaxies to be seen with such a dual structure — even though M104 has been known about since the mid-1700s.

“Spitzer is helping to unravel secrets behind an object that has been imaged thousands of times,” said Sean Carey of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at CalTech. “It is intriguing Spitzer can read the fossil record of events that occurred billions of years ago within this beautiful and archetypal galaxy.”

At a magnitude of +8, the Sombrero galaxy is just beyond the limit of naked-eye visibility but can be seen with small telescopes (4-inch/100 mm or larger). It is 28 million light-years away and can be found in the night sky located 11.5° west of Spica and 5.5° northeast of Eta Corvi.

Read more on the NASA press release here.

 

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Fireball Over California Exploded with Force of 5 Kilotons

Location of daylight (8 AM) fireball over California on April 22, 2012. Credit: NASA's Meteor Watch

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A daytime fireball over the skies of central/northern California on Sunday morning, April 22, 2012 caused a loud explosion and the event was also detected on several seismographs stations in the area. According to Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office, the source of the blast was a meteoroid about the size of a minivan, weighing in at around 70 metric tons (154,300 pounds) and at the time of disintegration released energy equivalent to a 5-kiloton explosion.

For comparison, conventional bombs yield energy from less than 1 ton to 44 tons, and the approximate energy released when the Chicxulub impact caused the mass extinction 65 million years ago was estimated to be equal to 96 million megatons of TNT.

“This was a BIG event,” said Elizabeth Silber of the Meteor Group at the Western University in Ontario, Canada.

“Most meteors you see in the night’s sky are the size of tiny stones or even grains of sand and their trail lasts all of a second or two,” said Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Fireballs you can see relatively easily in the daytime and are many times that size – anywhere from a baseball-sized object to something as big as a minivan.”

Silber estimates the location of its explosion in the upper atmosphere above California’s Central Valley. It is not known yet if any pieces of the space rock survived to land as meteorites, but the entire object was likely vaporized before hitting the ground. However, you can bet there are people out looking. (Silber said on the Meteorobs newsgroup that based on infrasonic data the approximate source coordinates are 37.6N, 120.5W).

Descriptions of the fireball range from a “silver flash” to like a “green glittering sparkler,” and one person said their sighting of the object was followed 4-5 minutes later by a loud sonic boom.

Unfortunately, since the huge fireball occurred during the day, all of NASA’s meteor-seeking cameras were turned off, so images of the event are sparse. You can see some at news station KTVN’s website.

This type of fireball is quite rare, and visual observations of them are even more rare. “An event of this size might happen about once a year,” said Yeomans. “But most of them occur over the ocean or an uninhabited area, so getting to see one is something special.”

That the fireball occurred during the Lyrid meteor shower is probably a coincidence, most experts are saying, as meteor shower meteors are generally small bits space dust that don’t produce large fireballs. However, another large fireball also occurred on April 20 in Brazil. See more information about that bolide here.

Posted on by Jason Major

Lunar Satellite Reveals Apollo 16 Remains

LROC image of the Apollo 16 site showing the Orion LM. (NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)


NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) made a low pass over the Apollo 16 site last fall, capturing images of the leftovers from John Young and Charlie Duke’s 1972 exploration of the Descartes Highlands. The video above takes us on a tour of the Apollo 16 site from lunar orbit, and includes audio from the original communications and some very nice comparative photos and video clips showing the same features from ground level.

The goal of Apollo 16 was to explore for the first time a lunar highlands location, and collect samples of what were initially thought to be volcanic rocks. The rocks were believed to be of a different material than what was collected during previous missions.

As it turned out, the rocks collected by Duke and Young weren’t volcanic in origin at all; they ended up being breccias — cemented-together chunks ejected from ancient cratering events hundreds of miles away.

Apollo 16 also set up various experiment packages to study lunar geology, magnetism and the solar wind. The Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) allowed Young and Duke to travel across a much wider area than they would have otherwise been able to on foot. It was the second mission to use an LRV, and the rover — as well as its tracks — are still there today, looking exactly as they did when they were left 40 years ago.

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The Apollo 16 ascent stage lifted off from the lunar surface on the evening of April 23, 1972 and docked with the Command Module containing Ken Mattingly. The following day the astronauts began their trip back to Earth, completing the 250,000-mile traverse three days later on April 27.

The Moon would be visited again in December of that same year during Apollo 17, the last mission of the program and the last time that humans would walk on the surface of another world. Now, 40 years later, satellites orbiting the Moon take pictures of what was left behind by these historic events. Perhaps someday soon the sites will be visited from ground level… maybe even by a new generation of astronauts.

Panorama of the Descartes Highlands site made from 3 Hasselblad film image scans combined together. (NASA/JSC/J. Major)

Read more about this on Arizona State University’s LROC site, and explore the full-frame Narrow-Angle Camera image from the LROC here.

Video: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Planetary Resources: The Video

Planetary Resources, Inc. has announced its plan to mine Near Earth Asteroids for their raw resources, ranging from water to precious metals like platinum. Using their Arkyd line of spacecraft, they will head to NEOs for exploration and extraction. One of the founders, Eric Anderson said they will launch their first spacecraft within 24 months, and eventually build ‘gas stations’ in space to enable deep space exploration.

The founders of this company say that resource extraction from asteroids will deliver multiple benefits to humanity and could be valued at billions of dollars annually. “The effort will tap into the high concentration of precious metals found on asteroids and provide a sustainable supply to the ever-growing population on Earth,” they said.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Question About Space Weather? NASA Scientists Have Answers

What’s the difference between a solar flare and a coronal mass ejection? What causes such energetic space events? Worried that the current solar cycle could harm our planet? Here’s part one of a two-part series of common questions people have about the Sun, space weather, and how they affect the Earth. (Part 2 will come out tomorrow.)

There’s also a great webpage from Goddard Space Flight Center that provides video answer to 25 questions on this this topic, such as “could a CME strip off the Earth’s magnetic field?” Check them all out!

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Planetary Resources Group Wants to Mine Asteroids

Asteroid mining concept. Credit: NASA/Denise Watt

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Last week a new company backed by a number of high-tech billionaires said they would be announcing a new space venture, and there was plenty of speculation of what the company –– called Planetary Resources — would be doing. Many ventured the company would be an asteroid mining outfit, and now, the company has revealed its purpose really is to focus on extracting precious resources such as metals and rare minerals from asteroids. “This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources,’” the group said.

Is this pie in the sky or a solid investment plan?

It turns out this company has been in existence for about three years, working quietly in the background, assembling their plan.

The group includes X PRIZE CEO Peter Diamandis, Space Adventures founder Eric Anderson, Google executives K. Ram Shriram, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, filmmaker James Cameron, former Microsoft chief software architect Charles Simonyi — a two-time visitor to the International Space Station — and Ross Perot Jr.
Even though their official press conference isn’t until later today, many of the founders started talking late yesterday. The group will initially focus on developing Earth orbiting telescopes to scan for the best asteroids, and later, create extremely low-cost robotic spacecraft for surveying missions.

A demonstration mission in orbit around Earth is expected to be launched within two years, according to the said company co-founders, and within five to 10 years, they hope to go from selling observation platforms in orbit to prospecting services, then travel to some of the thousands of asteroids that pass relatively close to Earth and extract their raw materials and bring them back to Earth.

But this company also plans to use the water found in asteroids to create orbiting fuel depots, which could be used by NASA and others for robotic and human space missions.

“We have a long view. We’re not expecting this company to be an overnight financial home run. This is going to take time,” Anderson said in an interview with Reuters.

President and Chief Engineer Chris Lewicki talked with Phil Plait yesterday and said “This is an attempt to make a permanent foothold in space. We’re going to enable this piece of human exploration and the settlement of space, and develop the resources that are out there.”

Lewicki was Flight Director for the NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity Mars rover missions, and also Mission Manager for the Mars Phoenix lander surface operations. He added that the plan structure is reminiscent of that of Apollo: have a big goal in mind, but make sure the steps along the way are practical.

Another of the aims of Planetary Resources is to open deep-space exploration to private industry, much like the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition, which Diamandis created. In previous talks, Diamandis has estimated that a small asteroid is worth about “20 trillion dollars in the platinum group metal marketplace.”

“The resources of Earth pale in comparison to the wealth of the solar system,” Eric Anderson told Wired.

The company will reveal more details in their press conference today (April 24) at 10:30 AM PDT | 12:30 PM CDT | 1:30 PM EDT | 5:30 UTC. You can watch at this link.

Planetary Resources website

Sources: Bad Astronomy, Wired, Reuters

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

The Best of Hubble: 22 Years of Amazing Images

Hubble Space Telescope Image Gallery
The Hubble Space Telescope
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22 years ago today, the Hubble Space Telescope launched into orbit. After overcoming initial problems, Hubble has gone on to become legendary, helping scientists to rewrite astronomy textbooks. To celebrate Hubble’s 22nd anniversary, here’s a slideshow from ESA’s Hubblecast that shows some of the best images from over two decades in orbit, set to specially commissioned music.

Here’s a list of the images shown and their descriptions:
Continue reading “The Best of Hubble: 22 Years of Amazing Images”

Posted on by Jason Major

The Family that Went to the Moon

A picture of a photograph: the family photo that Charlie Duke left on the Moon on April 23, 1972. (NASA)

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Well, the family photo, anyway.

On April 23, 1972, Apollo 16 astronauts Charlie Duke and John Young embarked on the third and final EVA of the mission, exploring the Descartes Highlands via Lunar Roving Vehicle. During the EVA, before setting up a Solar Wind Collector, Duke placed a small family photo he had brought along onto the lunar surface and snapped a few photos of  it with his Hasselblad film camera. This is one of the photos.

The portrait shows Charlie, his wife Dorothy, and their two sons Charles and Thomas. It looks like they are sitting on a bench in the summertime.

The family photo, gingerly wrapped in clear plastic and slightly crumpled from being stashed in the pocket of a space suit, was left on the Moon. It presumably still sits there today, just inches away from Charlie’s boot print — which, presumably, is also there.

The Duke family photo.

At the time of this writing it’s been exactly 40 years to the day that this photo was taken.

Image: NASA/JSC scan

I came across this image while looking through the Project Apollo Image Archive for some relevant images from the Apollo 16 mission. Amid scans of Hasselblad photos showing lunar samples, experiments and scenes from LRV jaunts, which are all fascinating in their own right, I came across this poignant image and couldn’t resist sharing it. To know that a family photo is resting upon the surface of another world is nothing short of amazing… while the missions to the Moon were a testament to human endeavor, it’s small things like this that remind us of the people that made it all possible.

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Astronomy Cast, Ep: 258: Viking Landers

Last week we talked about the orbiter portion of the Viking Missions. But that was only half the adventure. Each Viking spacecraft carried a lander as well, which touched down on the surface of Mars, searching for evidence of past and current life. And what they discovered is still up for debate.

We record Astronomy Cast live every Monday at 12 pm PST / 3 pm EST / 2000 GMT. If you want to join in our recording, just make sure you’ve got Fraser circled on Google+, then the show will show up in your stream. You can also watch us live at Cosmoquest.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

SpaceX Launch to Space Station Delayed

In a processing hangar at Space Launch Complex-40 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, Space Exploration Technologies technicians close the hatch of the Dragon capsule. Credit: NASA

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The historic flight of the first commercial transport to the International Space Station will have to wait at least another week. “After reviewing our recent progress, it was clear that we needed more time to finish hardware-in-the-loop testing and properly review and follow up on all data,” SpaceX said in a statement today. “While it is still possible that we could launch on May 3rd, it would be wise to add a few more days of margin in case things take longer than expected. As a result, our launch is likely to be pushed back by one week, pending coordination with NASA.”

And so, the launch which was going to take place on April 30 is now pushed back to no earlier than May 7. A static fire test of the Falcon 9 rocket that SpaceX had hoped to do today was slipped to the 27th, making the all the preparations for the launch next Monday a tight squeeze.

When launched, the Dragon will arrive at the ISS one to three days later and once there, Dragon will begin the demonstrations related to the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Phase 2 agreements (COTS 2) to show proper performance and control in the vicinity of the ISS, while remaining outside the Station’s safe zone. Then, if all goes well, Dragon will receive approval to begin the COTS 3 activities, where it will gradually approach within a few meters of the ISS, allowing astronauts to reach out and grapple Dragon with the Station’s robotic arm and then maneuver it carefully into one of the docking ports.