Posted on by VirtualAstro

Where will the UARS Satellite Crash?

ATV re-entry. Credit: ESA

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The bus sized UARS (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere early morning GMT on September 24. Right now, the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies lists the projected re-entry time as 05:10 UT on Sept. 24, plus or minus 2 hours.

NASA UPDATE “As of 7 p.m. EDT on Sept. 23, 2011, the orbit of UARS was 90 miles by 95 miles (145 km by 150 km). Re-entry is expected between 11 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23, and 3 a.m., Sept. 24, Eastern Daylight Time (3 a.m. to 7 a.m. GMT). During that time period, the satellite will be passing over Canada, Africa and Australia, as well as vast areas of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans. The risk to public safety is very remote.”

Due to the robust nature of some of the parts on the satellite, it is likely that approximately 500kg of material will impact the ground or water.

The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) has released a Local Air Safety Information special notice advising of the possibility of space debris.

The calculated risk that you’ll be hit by the falling space debris has been put at 1 in 3,200, said Nick Johnson, chief scientist with NASA’s Orbital Debris Program. But the chance that any one person on Earth getting hit by debris has been estimated at about 1 in 21 trillion.

It is highly unlikely that any injury or damage will be caused by this falling debris and NASA says; “The risk to public safety or property is extremely small, and safety is NASA’s top priority. Since the beginning of the Space Age in the late-1950s, there have been no confirmed reports of an injury resulting from re-entering space objects. Nor is there a record of significant property damage resulting from a satellite re-entry.”

It is still unsure where exactly the UARS satellite will pass over and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere, but it will be an incredibly bright fireball visible even in daylight. But if some debris ends up near you, don’t worry too much — it won’t be flaming hot. NASA says any pieces of UARS landing on Earth will not be very hot. The heating of objects passing through the atmosphere stops at about 32 km (20 miles) up, and cools after that.

Stay posted for more updates and if you are lucky enough to get an image of UARS burning up please let us know and post your images on our flickr group

Posted on by Jason Rhian

Surf, Sand & Space: The Astronaut Beach House

The astronaut beach house has served a crucial role in terms of providing astronauts a chance to collect their breaths and calm their minds before they thunder into space. Photo Credit: Alan Walters/awaltersphoto.com

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla – Astronauts preparing to launch into space for the better part of the last four decades have had a welcome refuge – the astronaut beach house. This small two-level structure it is often missed by those that are ferried past it to the nearby launch pads. The astronaut beach house is — for those set to thunder into orbit – a vital place to collect their thoughts before they make history. Let’s take a look inside, as three astronauts provide Universe Today with a guided tour of this historic and storied house.

Astronauts Robert Springer, Nicole P. Stott and Sam Durrance talked about their experiences at NASA's astronaut beach house. Photo Credit: Alan Walters/awaltersphoto.com

Robert C. Springer flew into space on space shuttle Discovery on STS-29 and on Atlantis for a Department of Defense mission on STS-38. For him, the beach house provided astronauts with a refuge from the hectic atmosphere that comes with preparing to launch to orbit. Springer retired from NASA and the United States Marine Corps in 1990. Afterward he worked for the Boeing Company as director of quality systems, Integrated Defense Systems. Springer views the beach house as a place for one to catch their breath – before the big day.

Sam T. Durrance is similar to both Springer in that he flew to orbit twice. His first mission was STS-35 aboard the space shuttle Columbia and his second was STS-67 on Endeavour. Durrance was a payload specialist on both of his two flights; this role required him to focus on each mission’s specific payload. Durrance is currently employed by the Florida Institute of Technology located in Melbourne, Florida, where he serves as a professor in the Department of Physics and Space Sciences.

Nicole P. Stott started out as a operations engineer at KSC in one of NASA’s Orbiter Processing Facilities. Stott supported human space flight endeavors in numerous roles at KSC before she moved to Johnson Space Center in 1998. She was selected for astronaut training two years later. Stott flew to the International Space Station on STS-128 where she stayed for 91 days before returning to Earth with the crew of STS-129. She would return to the ISS as a member of the STS-133 crew.

Stott came to agency later than Springer and Durrance and therefore her view is somewhat different. For her, the house served to both remind and include her in the area’s rich history.

“It’s a special place, you feel like your part of something here,” said Stott as she looked out from the beach house’s deck toward the ocean. “There is so much history here that while you know that when you’re here, it’s for an event that you’re participating in, but you’re aware that there is a lot that has gone on before you as well.”

Posted on by Jason Major

Breaking the Speed of Light

Particle Collider
Today, CERN announced that the LHCb experiment had revealed the existence of two new baryon subatomic particles. Credit: CERN/LHC/GridPP

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It’s been a tenet of the standard model of physics for over a century. The speed of light is a unwavering and unbreakable barrier, at least by any form of matter and energy we know of. Nothing in our Universe can travel faster than 299,792 km/s (186,282 miles per second), not even – as the term implies – light itself. It’s the universal constant, the “c” in Einstein’s E = mc2, a cosmic speed limit that can’t be broken.

That is, until now.

An international team of scientists at the Gran Sasso research facility outside of Rome announced today that they have clocked neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. The neutrinos, subatomic particles with very little mass, were contained within beams emitted from CERN 730 km (500 miles) away in Switzerland. Over a period of three years, 15,000 neutrino beams were fired from CERN at special detectors located deep underground at Gran Sasso. Where light would have made the trip in 2.4 thousandths of a second, the neutrinos made it there 60 nanoseconds faster – that’s 60 billionths of a second – a tiny difference to us but a huge difference to particle physicists!

The implications of such a discovery are staggering, as it would effectively undermine Einstein’s theory of relativity and force a rewrite of the Standard Model of physics.

The OPERA Neutrino Detector. Credit: LGNS.

“We are shocked,” said project spokesman and University of Bern physicist Antonio Ereditato.

“We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing. We now want colleagues to check them independently.”

Neutrinos are created naturally from the decay of radioactive materials and from reactions that occur inside stars. Neutrinos are constantly zipping through space and can pass through solid material easily with little discernible effect… as you’ve been reading this billions of neutrinos have already passed through you!

The experiment, called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) is located in Italy’s Gran Sasso facility 1,400 meters (4,593 feet) underground and uses a complex array of electronics and photographic plates to detect the particle beams. Its subterranean location helps prevent experiment contamination from other sources of radiation, such as cosmic rays. Over 750 scientists from 22 countries around the world work there.

Ereditato is confident in the results as they have been consistently measured in over 16,000 events over the past two years. Still, other experiments are being planned elsewhere in an attempt to confirm these remarkable findings. If they are confirmed, we may be looking at a literal breakdown of the modern rules of physics as we know them!

“We have high confidence in our results,” said Ereditato. “We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing. We now want colleagues to check them independently.”

A preprint of the OPERA results will be posted on the physics website ArXiv.org.

Read more on the Nature article here and on Reuters.com.

UPDATE: The OPERA team paper can be found here.

 

 

Posted on by Jon Voisey

Globular Clusters on a Plane

Smaller satellite galaxies caught by a spiral galaxy are distorted into elongated structures consisting of stars, which are known as tidal streams, as shown in this artist's impression. Credit: Jon Lomberg

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Globular clusters are generally some of the oldest structures in our galaxy. Many of the most famous ones formed around the same time as our galaxy, some 13 billion years ago. However, some are distinctly younger. While many classification schemes are used, one breaks globular clusters into three groups: an old halo group which includes the oldest of the clusters, those in the disk and bulge of the galaxy which tend to have higher metallicity, and a younger population of halo clusters. The latter of these provides a bit of a problem since the galaxy should have settled into a disk by the time they formed, depriving them of the necessary materials to form in the first place. But a new study suggests a solution that’s not of this galaxy.

The new study looked at the distribution of these younger clusters around our Milky Way. Of the three classifications for globular clusters discussed, the young halo clusters are scattered well beyond the range of the other populations. The young halo extends to as much as 120 kiloparsecs (400 thousand light years) while the old halo clusters tend to lie within 30 kiloparsecs (100 thousand light years). Additionally, the young clusters don’t appear to be rotating with the disk of the galaxy whereas the old halo slowly orbits in the same direction as the disk.

In looking more carefully at the positions of these satellites, the team, led by Stefan Keller at the Australian National University, found that the younger population tends to lie in a wide plane that is tilted from the rotational axis of our galaxy by a mere 8°.

This plane is strikingly similar to another recognized grouping of objects: Many of the known dwarf galaxies lie in a nearly identical plane, known as the Plane of Satellites (PoS). This finding suggests that this population of globular clusters is a relic of cannibalized galaxies. Even more interesting is that, while these objects are younger than the distinctly “old” population, there is still a large variation in their ages. This implies that this plane wasn’t created by the accretion of one, or even a few minor galaxies, but a consistent feeding of small galaxies onto the Milky Way for much of the history of the universe, and all from the same direction. Studies of the distribution of satellites around our nearest major neighbor, M31, the Andromeda galaxy, has turned up a similar preferred plane, tilted some 59° from its disk.

One explanation for this is that this is a preferred direction that traces invisible filaments of dark matter. While dark matter distributions are difficult to predict, models haven’t accounted for such strong filamentary structure on such small scales. Rather, in the neighborhood of our galaxy, the overall distribution is described as an oblate spheroid. One of the reasons astronomers believe our own dark matter halo is so nicely shaped is the way it is affecting the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy which is slowly being accreted onto our own. If the dark matter were more wispy, it should be stretched out in different manners.

Another possibility the authors consider is that the objects were created in a preferred plane “from the break up of a large progenitor at early times”. In other words, the filament could be a fossil of larger structure before our galaxy formed along which these dwarf galaxies formed and from which these galaxies could have been slowly accreting over the history of the galaxy.

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Google+ Is Live for Everyone

I’ve handed out hundreds (maybe thousands?) of Google+ invites to Universe Today readers, but now the service is open to everyone. If you’re interested in joining, you can go over to the Google Plus homepage and sign up.

Once you’re there, you can circle Fraser, Nancy, Ray, Adrian, Jon, and Steve.

And while you’re there, circle our space-minded friends: Phil, Pamela, Ian, Brian, Emily, Nicole, Alan… and more!

We record every episode of Astronomy Cast as a live Google+ Hangout, so 8 lucky listeners can watch the fearsome reality of our recording process. Once seen, it can’t be unseen! As soon as Google lets us start using Google Hangouts on Air, we’re planning to widen the audience. Oh, and if there are any Googlers reading, please, give us access… please?

(I know what you’re thinking, but I promise, Google didn’t pay me for this.)

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

Martian Clay A Vessel For Water?

Light-Toned Deposits: This image reveals exposed layers in Noctis Labyrinthus which may contain signatures of iron bearing sulfates and phyllosilcate (clay) minerals. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

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Although it might seem like a fictitious nomenclature, smectite is a real substance and it’s been found on Mars. It’s a clay mineral that, like a sponge, expands and contracts as it takes on liquid water. With magnesium, iron, aluminum and silica in their content, smectites are morphed into being when silicates are exposed to non-acid water. Now Mars has yielded up two such deposits that further indicate the presence of a once wetter world.

“We discovered locations at Noctis Labyrinthus that show many kinds of minerals that formed by water activity,” said Catherine Weitz, lead author and senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. “The clays we found, called iron/magnesium (Fe/Mg)-smectites, are much younger at Noctis Labyrinthus relative to those found in the ancient rocks on Mars, which indicates a different water environment in these depressions relative to what was happening elsewhere on Mars.”

Thanks to high-resolution images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera and hyperspectral data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft, combined with Digital Terrain Models (DTMs), Weitz and her team observed about 300 meters of escarpment restricted to two 30 to 40 kilometer troughs located at the western edge of the Vallis Marineris canyon. By studying the “geological layers” the team was able to map hydrated minerals and better understand how the water chemistry evolved.

“These clays formed from persistent water in neutral to basic conditions around 2 to 3 billion years ago, indicating these two troughs are unique and could have been a more habitable region on Mars at a time when drier conditions dominated the surface,” said co-author and CRISM team member Janice Bishop from the SETI Institute and NASA AMES Research Center.

The huge troughs reveal a rich geological chronicle of events. Like reading a book, each layer is a chapter in Martian water history. As they would fill, they would take on a chemical signature of that era. Then the troughs would erode and nearby volcanism added its own particular brands. Again, they would fill and chemicals would mix. Even the pH levels of the water adds its own fingerprint to the smectite equation. While it isn’t a unique find, what sets this area apart is that things appear to have happened in a reverse order as opposed to what happened globally across Mars. As exciting as these new finds are, for now studies will have to remain photographic.

“These troughs would be fantastic places to send a rover, but unfortunately the rugged terrain makes it unsafe both for landing and for driving,” Weitz said.

Original Story Source: Planetary Science Institute Press Release.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Big Find: Citizen Scientists Discover Two Extrasolar Planets

Three exoplanet candidates found by the Planet Hunters citizen science project. Credit: Zooniverse

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Hip-hip hooray for citizen scientists! The first two exoplanet candidates have been identified by members of the public through the citizen science project Planet Hunters. The project, which began in December 2010, uses public archive data from the planet-hunting Kepler mission, and excitingly, the planets were found within the first month after the project began. One planet is potentially a rocky Earth-like planet, while the other is likely a gas-giant like Jupiter.

“I think it’s truly amazing that someone sitting at home at their computer was the first to know that a star somewhere out there in our Milky Way likely has a companion,” said Meg Schwamb, a Yale University researcher and Planet Hunters co-founder.

By all accounts, the Kepler mission has been a spectacular success – with over 1,200 planet candidates detected so far– and the data obtained by the spacecraft has been a treasure trove for scientists. But over 40,000 web users from around the world have been helping professional astronomers analyze the light from 150,000 stars in the hopes of discovering planets – and especially Earth-like planets — orbiting around them.

“These planet candidates just show what wealth of interesting gems still remaining to be found in the Kepler data,” Schwamb told Universe Today. She added that for the science team, the Planet Hunters project was somewhat of a gamble, as no one was sure human eyes would be able to spot things possibly missed by automated routines.

“The gamble paid off, and we’re all very excited about the discovery of these planet candidates,” she said. “These candidates have demonstrated the truly amazing power of human pattern recognition. Planet Hunters doesn’t replace the great work and the analysis being done by the Kepler team. But it has proven itself to be a valuable and complementary tool in the search for extrasolar planets.”

The Planet Hunters team sent the top 10 candidates found by the citizen scientists to the Kepler team, and two of the planets have survived the initial checks for false-positives, whether they are masquerading as eclipsing binaries, for example. Scientists used the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) at Caltech to analyze the host stars and determined that two of the 10 met their criteria for being classified as planet candidates.

The two candidates were flagged as potential planets by several dozen different Planet Hunters users, as the same data are analyzed by more than one user.

The two candidate planets orbit their host stars with periods ranging from 10 to 50 days — much shorter than the 365 days it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun — and have radii that range in size from two-and-a-half to eight times Earth’s radius. Despite one planet having the potential to be a rocky world, it does not lie in the so-called “habitable zone” where liquid water, and therefore life as we know it, could exist.

Schwamb said to confirm a transiting planet, the team scientists will look at the radial velocities to measure the wobble of the star back and forth caused by the orbiting body.

“This allows you to get the mass of the orbiting companion,” she said. “Kepler was always intended to be a statistical mission. The majority of the over 1,200 Kepler planet candidates and the planet candidates found by Planet Hunters will not be confirmed with radial velocity measurements either because the star is too faint or the radial velocity signal caused by the orbiting planet would be smaller than the current sensitivity limits of the world’s best spectrographs. If it’s possible that we can confirm the presence of these planets with radial velocities measured on the Keck telescopes, we will definitely try.”

As of now, the Planet Hunter scientists, which also includes Yale astronomer Debra Fisher, say there is at least a 95% chance that these two candidates are bona fide planets.

Spurred by success, the Planet Hunters citizen scientist are now sifting through a new round of publicly available data from the Kepler mission in hopes of finding even more planets. “This is what we found after just a preliminary glance through the first round of Kepler data,” Fischer said. “There’s no doubt that, with each new round of data, there will be more discoveries to come.”

Read the team’s paper here. It has been submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

UARS Update: NASA Refines Crashing Satellite’s Debris Region and Location

This video from Analytical Graphics, Inc. shows an updated animated analysis of the break-up of the the 6-ton, bus-sized UARS satellite. It likely will burn up at an altitude between 80-45 kilometers, with an estimated 26 pieces of debris re-entering the atmosphere for land fall or splash down. The debris zone is predicted to be about 500 miles long.

The latest update put out by NASA on the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is that as of 1:30 p.m. EDT Sept. 21, 2011, (17:30 GMT) the orbit of UARS was 120 mi by 130 mi (190 km by 205 km). Re-entry is expected sometime during the afternoon of Sept. 23, Eastern Daylight Time. NASA says the satellite will not be passing over North America during that time period, but that it is still too early to predict the time and location of re-entry with any more certainty. They will be able to further refine more details in the next 24 to 48 hours.

AGI has created an app for Android phones where you can track the UARS orbit track. See this link for more info.

Sources: NASA, AGI

Posted on by Jason Rhian

What are the experts saying about SLS?

NASA's recent announcement concerning the design of the Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket has garnered a lot of attention - and comments - from aerospace experts. Image Credit: NASA.gov

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla – NASA’s recent unveiling of what its Space Launch System or SLS would look like created a buzz in the aerospace industry. Some experts in this field have weighed in on what they thought of the design, the politics and the time involved in producing the space agency’s next heavy-left launch vehicle.

Wayne Hale was NASA’s shuttle program manager before he left the space agency in 2010. In his view, the rocket is a needed tool to provide the country with the tools needed to power the U.S. to points beyond low-Earth-orbit (LEO).

“All of us who are interested in the future advancement of space exploration applaud any efforts to expand launch capabilities. If the nation can afford a large rocket like the SLS, it would be very useful in the long run,” Hale said.

Kent Rominger, a former astronaut who is now Alliant Techsystems Vice-President for Test and Research Operations agrees. He says that the United States does not need either access to LEO or a heavy lift rocket – it needs both.

“For some reason we’ve been told that it’s either Heavy-Lift or access to LEO,” said Rominger. “If we ever want to go beyond LEO again – we need heavy lift.”

NASA's space launch system would use many of NASA's existing resources and facilities. Image Credit: NASA.gov

Robert Springer has decades of experience in the aerospace industry. First as a fighter pilot, and then as an astronaut before he entered the private sector with Boeing.

“It’s a relief to finally get a decision out of NASA, hopefully one that is fully supported by the administration and congress in terms of budget. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like much, if anything new, in the way of technology. So why is it going to take so long to get it into testing and flight—NASA did the Apollo evolution faster, and it was pretty much new technology. Even the proposed look at liquid boosters is hardly new; MSFC (Marshall Space Flight Center) had several contracts with industry to look into this technology back in the 1990’s. There are likely other areas of technology enhancement that will be included, but again, I am relatively sure that a lot of the technology (new power storage devices, something other than hydrazine for control jets, improved monitoring systems, etc) has or is being looked at. In fact, shuttle was working on that sort of technology before the administration decided to pull the plug and cancel shuttle,” Springer said. “So, good to see NASA moving forward, but it would seem that they’re really being very conservative about going forward—not sure why. Other item of note, the latest announcement that the commercial development is going to take a step back and go forward with more traditional procurement, as opposed to some of the advances made in terms of the Space Act, seems like a giant leap backward.”

Charles Bolden, a former astronaut himself and NASA’s current administrator had this to say after NASA unveiled the rocket to the world.

“This launch system will create good-paying American jobs, ensure continued U.S. leadership in space, and inspire millions around the world,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. “President Obama challenged us to be bold and dream big, and that’s exactly what we are doing at NASA. While I was proud to fly on the space shuttle, tomorrow’s explorers will now dream of one day walking on Mars.”

If other initiatives that NASA is currently investing in as well as SLS prove viable in the long term the space agency stands to not only regain the capacity to send astronauts to the International Space Station – it would also be able to once again travel beyond LEO.

The design of the SLS is similar to the proposed Ares V of the Constellation Program. Images Credit: NASA.gov

Posted on by Steve Nerlich

Carnival of Space #215

This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by our very own Steve Nerlich at his very own Cheap Astronomy website.

Click here to read the Carnival of Space #215. Steve, as usual, has gone above and beyond the call of duty and has also created a podcast version of this Week’s Carnival.

And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to [email protected], and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, sign up to be a host. Send and email to the above address.