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 an email to the above address.
A view of the International Space Station as seen by the last departing space shuttle crew, STS-135. Credit: NASA
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For personal reasons I had to miss the NASA press conference this morning which gave an update on International Space Station operations following the failure and crash of a Progress resupply vehicle last week. When I returned home and saw the headlines about the briefing from other news sites, I thought, “Wow, everyone is really overreacting about how this might affect the space station.” But then I watched a replay of the briefing and realized no news site was being overly melodramatic. NASA’s Space Station Manager Mike Suffredini laid out a fairly bleak picture of how quickly the ISS will have to be de-manned if the anomaly with the Soyuz-family of rockets isn’t figured out soon. The problem is not logistics or supplies; it all hinges on the Soyuz capsules themselves and their limited lifespan. If the anomaly is not figured out soon and the Soyuz rockets aren’t flying by mid-November, the space station will have to be de-crewed and be operated unmanned, remotely from the ground.
UPDATE: Please read our update on the situation, where the Russian space agency says they may have found the cause of the anomaly.
“If we don’t have the Soyuz flying by mid-November, then we would have to de-man the ISS at that time,” Suffredini said. “We are focusing on keeping the crew safe. The next focus is trying to keep the ISS manned. If it takes us awhile to resolve the anomaly and we have to de-man the ISS, we certainly have a safe way to do that. But we will try to avoid that if we can because we would like to continue operations. “
Suffredini said the focus of the entire program and in particular the focus of the Russian space agency is to determine the cause of the anomaly and to resolve it and then get back to flying safely.
This first post-shuttle era launch of a Progress cargo ship abruptly ended at about six minutes into the flight on August 24 when an engine anomaly prompted a computer to shutdown an engine, just before the third stage of the Soyuz rocket ignited. The rocket and ship crashed to Earth in eastern Russia, in a heavily wooded, mountainous, sparsely populated area in the Choisk region of the Republic of Altai.
“They believe it broke apart and they would like to find it, but as of this morning they had not located anything yet,” Suffredini.
The loss of supplies on board the Progress cargo ship is trivial, and not an issue at all. The space station is well-supplied into next summer, thanks to the additional space shuttle flight, STS-135 which brought up a filled-to-the-brim cargo container. The issue is the 200-day lifespan of a Soyuz capsule on orbit, particularly the perioxide thruster system which is not certified to last past 200 days.
Life aboard the ISS: Ron Garan trims astronaut Mike Fossum's hair in the Tranquility node of the International Space Station. Credit: NASA
Expedition 28 commander Andrey Borisenko, Alexander Samokutyaev and Ron Garan were scheduled to return to Earth on September 8, with another crew of Expedition 29 (Anton Shkaplerov, Anatoly Ivanishin and Dan Burbank) heading to the ISS on the Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft on September 22 to return the crew back to a compliment of six.
Suffredini said they now plan to keep the three Exp. 28 crewmembers on board until mid-September or perhaps another week or so, but they can’t really go beyond that. The opportunities for landing during the daylight (required for safety reasons) in Kazakhstan end around September 19 and do not become available again until around October 26. But by that time, however, the crew’s Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft will have been in orbit about 10 days beyond its certified 200-day limit.
“In general, we will probably end up bringing the crew home in the middle of September, to not endanger the crew getting home safely,” Suffredini said. He added later that they have talked about the possibility of recertifying the Soyuz to study whether it could last longer, but that would require a lot of work.
“The general theory is when you’ve already been handed one significant challenge you shouldn’t try to do another,” he said.
Originally the schedule called for another unmanned Progress launching on October 26, and then the remainder of Exp. 28 ( Fossum, Volkov and Furukawa) to return to Earth on November 16, with their replacements (Oleg Kononenko, Don Pettit and Andre Kuipers) coming to the station on Soyuz TMA-03M on Nov. 30.
The first of those threesomes can’t stay on orbit much longer than November 16, again because of daylight issues at landing and it’s not until the end of December when the daylight landing times align, which again, pushes the limit on the Soyuz lifespan.
So if the anomaly isn’t figured out by mid- November, the station will become unmanned. Suffredini said having an unmanned ISS isn’t really a problem logistically: They would configure the station that all systems were running redundantly, such as cooling and heating, and they would isolate each module by closing all hatches.
“Assuming no significant anamolies, which would be two system failures in a redundant system, we can operate indefinitely,” Suffredini said. He added that, of course, they prefer not to operate without crew for an extended time, mostly because of the loss of science opportunities. But they can do things like avoidance maneuvers or reboosts remotely from the ground.
In the meantime, a group of Russian rocket engineers are studying the problem, and we can assume NASA is giving whatever assistance they can. Two Soyuz-family of unmanned rockets are scheduled to launch, which may be a good thing: a commercial Soyuz to launch mobile communications satellites is scheduled on Oct. 8, and the Russians may launch the October 26 Progress resupply ship earlier in order to have another unmanned launch to study the problem.
When asked about the bad PR this situation must be presenting for NASA, especially in this time of tight budgets and the perceived lack of a mission for NASA, Suffredini paused before answering.
“Right now we are focusing on flying the space station safely,” he said. “I haven’t worried about the PR associated with it. For us, given this, what we see is an anomaly of a vehicle that maybe — if you think about it – was sort of a gift, to tell us about a potential problem without putting humans on a similar vehicle. This is a great opportunity to learn about an anomaly and resolve it without putting a crew at risk. Flying safely is much more important than anything else I can think about right at this instant.”
“I’m sure we’ll have the opportunity to discuss any political implications,” Suffredini continued, “if we spend a lot of time on the ground, but we’ll have to deal with them because we’re going to do what is right for the crew and the space station. It is a very big investment for our government and our job is to be good stewards to protect that investment. My goal is to get flying safely and get on with research and protect the crew and that investment along the way.”
For the observing weekend warriors, the last few days have been a very exciting time. Not only have we been treated to a supernova event in Messier 101, but we’ve had the opportunity to watch Comet C/2009 P1 Garradd silently slip by Messier 71! Wish you were there? Step inside and you can be…
A few days ago we brought you a “live” broadcast of the comet thanks to Bareket Observatory. Thousands of UT readers had the opportunity to view and enjoy for a full six hours and – thankfully – the weather cooperated. Want to see the results? You can check out the comet video here.
On Friday, August 27th, comet Garradd had another “picturesque” moment… It swept by an often over-looked Messier object – M71.
But it didn’t pass by John Chumack!
At a distance of 1.402 AU from Earth and 2.193 AU from the Sun, Comet Garradd continues to brighten and will reach perihelion on December 23, 2011. That’s quite a difference from M71’s 13,000 light year distance! Right now the two are almost of identical magnitude, and while the comet has moved on, you can still find M71 in the constellation of Sagitta at Right Ascension: 19 : 53.8 (h:m) – Declination: +18 : 47 (deg:m).
And this isn’t the first time a comet has crossed paths with this star cluster. As a matter of fact, it was in looking for a comet that this bundle of stars was discovered by Pierre Mechain and dutifully and correctly logged by Charles Messier on October 4, 1780. Said Messier, “Nebula discovered by M. Mechain on June 28, 1780, between the stars Gamma and Delta Sagittae. On October 4 following, M. Messier looked for it: its light is very faint and it contains no star; the least light makes it disappear. It is situated about 4 degrees below [south of] that which M. Messier discovered in Vulpecula. See No. 27. He reported it on the Chart of the Comet of 1779.”
Imagine how impressed Mechain and Messier would be if they could see what John did 222 years later! He used a QHY8 CCD Camera and compressed the two and half hour video into the segment you see above. It was done at his Yellow Springs, Ohio observatory and shot through his 16″ homemade telescope.
Now that’s cookin’!
Many thanks to John Chumack of Galactic Images for sharing this incredible video with us!
C/2010 X1 Elenin, on Aug 29, 2011. Credit: Michael Mattiazzo. Used by permission
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Astronomers monitoring Comet Elenin have noticed the comet has decreased in brightness the past week, and the coma is now elongating and diffusing. Some astronomers predict the comet will disintegrate and not survive perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun.
On August 19, a massive solar flare and coronal mass ejection hit the comet, which may have been the beginning of the end for the much ballyhooed lump of ice and dirt.
Comet Elenin as seenby the STEREO HI1-B on Aug. 6, 2011, from about 7 million kilometers from the spacecraft. Credit: NASA/STEREO
“We’ve been following it in the STEREO spacecraft images and a number of amateurs have been following it in their telescopes,” said Australian amateur astronomer Ian Musgrave, author of the Astroblog website. “Shortly after the coronal mass ejection the comet flared up and you could see some beautiful details in the tail, with the tail was twisting about in the solar wind. But shortly after that Earth- bound amateurs reported a huge decrease in the intensity of the comet. We think it may presage a falling apart of the comet.”
“It really has been a beautiful little comet and it deserves a better fate than to be overhyped by doom-sayers,” said Musgrave.
Elenin is a long period comet originating from the outer edges of our solar system, and Musgrave noted that comets coming from the Oort cloud which are making their first pass through the solar system tend to be under-performers in terms of brightness. “They don’t brighten as quickly as comets that come around more than once,” he said, “and in looking at the relationship between the brightness and the distance from the Sun, we find empirically that comets that brighten on roughly the same speed as Elenin tend to be likely to fall apart at perihelion.”
However, Musgrave added, each comet is unique. “Some comets will survive and some won’t. The fact that this comet decreased in brightness after the CME, possibly indicates that the comet will not survive. Another possibility is that merely the CME wiped away the coma — the bright cloud of particles around the comet — and the volatiles of the comet might take awhile to come back and recreate the coma, if it does survive.”
Elenin’s mass is smaller than average and its trajectory will take it no closer than 34 million km (21 million miles) of Earth as it circles the Sun. It will make its closest approach to Earth on October 16th, but be closest to the Sun on Sept. 10.
Animation of 5 images taken Aug 19,22,23,27,29 displaying the nucleus of Comet Elenin in the process of disintegrating. Credit: Michael Mattiazzo. Used by permission
Another Australian amateur Michael Mattiazzo has been taking images of the comet (see his website, Southern Comets) and he has noticed that the nucleus appears to be elongating. When that occurs, usually the comet disintegrates or splits apart. Above is an animation Mattiazzo created from images he took of Comet Elenin on August 19, 22, 23, 27 & 29.
You can see a wide-field view of the comet by astrophotographer Rob Kaufmanns, comparing the view from August 19, 23 and 26 at this link.
A similar process took place just a few weeks ago with another comet, 213P Van Ness.
Do comets break apart often?
“You don’t see it it that often, but it happens surprisingly more than people think,” Musgrave said. “Van Ness just happened, but ever couple of years there is a comet that visibly breaks up into fragments, maybe about 6 comets in the last 10 years — excluding the Kreutz-sun-grazer family of comets which split and vaporize on a regular basis.”
A closeup photo of the breakup of Comet S4 LINEAR taken on August 6, 2000 by the European Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Credit: ESO
Unfortunately, the likely demise of Comet Elenin hasn’t put a lid on the doomsdayers who have predicted earthquakes or three days of darkness or a collision with Earth.
“The doomsdayers are just saying that more bad things will happen!” laughed Musgrave. “But you have to remember that when a comet breaks up, the fragments stay in the same orbit. If it evaporates, you’ll have a mass of rubble and gas on the same orbit. People don’t seem to get that space is big, really big, and when a comet breaks up it follows Newtons Laws and the fragments will slowly draw apart, but over the timescale that we see them, the difference will be so miniscule.”
We mentioned this a couple of years ago, but I think it’s time for a reminder. There’s a great Twitter service called @twisst, which you can use to notify you when the International Space Station is going to be passing overhead in your region. It pulls your location from your profile, and then calculates good viewing times for you to see the station. All you have to do is follow the Twitter account.
Oh, and while you’re following Twitter accounts, don’t forget to follow the Universe Today Twitter feed.
P.S. Now I’m off to watch the station go overhead my house… thanks @twisst!
Northwestern Europe at night, as seen from the International Space Station on August 10, 2011. Credit: NASA
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Astronauts always say the view of Earth is the best part of being in space. Here’s a beautiful shot of northwestern Europe at night. The landscape is dotted with clusters of lights from individual urban areas; visible are London, Paris, Brussels, Milan and Amsterdam, which stand out due to their large light “footprints,” while the English Channel is completely dark.
This photograph was taken by one of the Expedition 28 crewmembers on the International Space Station (ISS) and was taken with a short camera lens, providing the wide field of view. To give a sense of scale, the centers of the London and Paris metropolitan areas are approximately 340 kilometers (210 miles) from each other.
Concerns about a 'big science machine' destroying the Earth have been around since the steam engine. The LHC is the latest target for such conspiracy theories. Credit: CERN.
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Surprisingly, rumors still persist in some corners of the Internet that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is going to destroy the Earth – even though nearly three years have passed since it was first turned on. This may be because it is yet to be ramped up to full power in 2014 – although it seems more likely that this is just a case of moving the goal posts, since the same doomsayers were initially adamant that the Earth would be destroyed the moment the LHC was switched on, in September 2008.
The story goes that the very high energy collisions engineered by the LHC could jam colliding particles together with such force that their mass would be compressed into a volume less than the Schwarzschild radius required for that mass. In other words, a microscopic black hole would form and then grow in size as it sucked in more matter, until it eventually consumed the Earth.
Here’s a brief run-through of why this can’t happen.
1. Microscopic black holes are implausible.
While a teaspoon of neutron star material might weigh several million tons, if you extract a teaspoon of neutron star material from a neutron star it will immediately blow out into the volume you might expect several million tons of mass to usually occupy.
Notwithstanding you can’t physically extract a teaspoon of black hole material from a black hole – if you could, it is reasonable to expect that it would also instantly expand. You can’t maintain these extreme matter densities outside of a region of extreme gravitational compression that is created by the proper mass of a stellar-scale object.
The hypothetical physics that might allow for the creation of microscopic black holes (large extra dimensions) proposes that gravity gains more force in near-Planck scale dimensions. There is no hard evidence to support this theory – indeed there is a growing level of disconfirming evidence arising from various sources, including the LHC.
High energy particle collisions involve converting momentum energy into heat energy, as well as overcoming the electromagnetic repulsion that normally prevents charged particles from colliding. But the heat energy produced quickly dissipates and the collided particles fragment into sub-atomic shrapnel, rather than fusing together. Particle colliders attempt to mimic conditions similar to the Big Bang, not the insides of massive stars.
2. A hypothetical microscopic black hole couldn’t devour the Earth anyway.
Although whatever goes on inside the event horizon of a black hole is a bit mysterious and unknowable – physics still operates in a conventional fashion outside. The gravitational influence exerted by the mass of a black hole falls away by the inverse square of the distance from it, just like it does for any other celestial body.
The gravitational influence exerted by a microscopic black hole composed of, let’s say 1000 hyper-compressed protons, would be laughably small from a distance of more than its Schwarzschild radius (maybe 10-18 metres). And it would be unable to consume more matter unless it could overcome the forces that hold other matter together – remembering that in quantum physics, gravity is the weakest force.
It’s been calculated that if the Earth had the density of solid iron, a hypothetical microscopic black hole in linear motion would be unlikely to encounter an atomic nucleus more than once every 200 kilometres – and if it did, it would encounter a nucleus that would be at least 1,000 times larger in diameter.
So the black hole couldn’t hope to swallow the whole nucleus in one go and, at best, it might chomp a bit off the nucleus in passing – somehow overcoming the strong nuclear force in so doing. The microscopic black hole might have 100 such encounters before its momentum carried it all the way through the Earth and out the other side, at which point it would probably still be a good order of magnitude smaller in size than an uncompressed proton.
And that still leaves the key issue of charge out of the picture. If you could jam multiple positively-charged protons together into such a tiny volume, the resultant object should explode, since the electromagnetic force far outweighs the gravitational force at this scale. You might get around this if an exactly equivalent number of electrons were also added in, but this requires appealing to an implausible level of fine-tuning.
You maniacs! You blew it up! We may not be walking on the Moon again any time soon - but we won't be destroying the Earth with an ill-conceived physics experiment any time soon either. Credit: Dean Reeves.
3. What the doomsayers say
When challenged with the standard argument that higher-than-LHC energy collisions occur naturally and frequently as cosmic ray particles collide with Earth’s upper atmosphere, LHC conspiracy theorists refer to the high school physics lesson that two cars colliding head-on is a more energetic event than one car colliding with a brick wall. This is true, to the extent that the two car collision has twice the kinetic energy as the one car collision. However, cosmic ray collisions with the atmosphere have been measured as having 50 times the energy that will ever be generated by LHC collisions.
In response to the argument that a microscopic black hole would pass through the Earth before it could achieve any appreciable mass gain, LHC conspiracy theorists propose that an LHC collision would bring the combined particles to a dead stop and they would then fall passively towards the centre of the Earth with insufficient momentum to carry them out the other side.
This is also implausible. The slightest degree of transverse momentum imparted to LHC collision fragments after a head-on collision of two particles travelling at nearly 300,000 kilometres a second will easily give those fragments an escape velocity from the Earth (which is only 11.2 kilometres a second, at sea-level).
Mars and the Moon -- NOT. Credit: Scientific American
[/caption]Twitter users Kris McCall and Wayne Povey reminded me that it’s August 27th today. Don’t you know what that is? That’s the day all those stupid “Mars is going to look bigger than the Moon” hoax emails go around the internet. We’ll usually get deluged by emails from the recipients, and have to write up a big response explaining it… again… and again… and again.
But I just realized… I haven’t gotten a single email this year. I totally forgot to mention it in Universe Today.
So that’s it, I’m officially calling this hoax over. You hear me hoaxers and remailers? You’ve lost. People now understand that there’s no possible way that Mars can look bigger in the sky. Your ridiculous hoax is falling on deaf ears. It just took 8 years of non-stop debunking.
This raw, unprocessed image of Hyperion was taken on August 25, 2011 and received on Earth August 26, 2011. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
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It might be one of the weirdest-looking moons in the solar system: Saturn’s moon Hyperion looks like a giant sponge. Additionally, its eccentric orbit makes it subject to gravitational forces from Saturn, so it is just tumbling along, almost out of control. Just yesterday, August 25, 2011, the Cassini spacecraft made a relatively close flyby of Hyperion (24,000 km 15,000 miles away) and took some amazing images.
“Hyperion is a small moon … just 168 miles across (270 kilometers)… orbiting between Titan and Iapetus,” said Carolyn Porco in an email. Porco is the Cassini imaging team lead. “It has an irregular shape and surface appearance, and it rotates chaotically as it tumbles along in orbit, making it impossible to say just exactly what terrain we would image during this flyby.”
See some more of the shots below:
Side view taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft of Saturn's moon Hyperion. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Scientists say this flyby’s closeness has likely allowed Cassini’s cameras to map new territory. At the very least, it will help scientists improve color measurements of the moon. It will also help them determine how the moon’s brightness changes as lighting and viewing conditions change, which can provide insight into the texture of the surface. The color measurements provide additional information about different materials on the moon’s deeply pitted surface.
A darker view of Hyperion. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteNASA's Cassini spacecraft obtained this unprocessed image of Saturn's moon Hyperion on Aug. 25, 2011. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
The next closest pass of Hyperion is coming up again soon: Sept. 16, 2011, when it passes the tumbling moon at a distance of about 36,000 miles (58,000 kilometers).
Composite image of Speca: Optical SDSS image of the galaxies in yellow, low resolution radio image from NVSS in blue, high resolution radio image from GMRT in red. CREDIT: Hota et al., SDSS, NCRA-TIFR, NRAO/AUI/NSF.
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A newly discovered galaxy is aiding astronomers in the research into the early evolution of individual galaxies and galaxy clusters. Named Speca, this unique finding is only the second spiral galaxy known to produce “jets” – streams of subatomic particles emitted from the nucleus. What’s more, it’s also one of two which shows this activity happened in separate intervals.
As astronomers know, galaxy jets are formed at the heart of activity where a supermassive black hole is present. While both elliptical and spiral galaxies have known supermassive black holes, only one had been known to produce copious amounts of material from its poles – Messier 87. Now Speca is changing the way researchers look for recurring activity.
“This is probably the most exotic galaxy with a black hole ever seen. It has the potential to teach us new lessons about how galaxies and clusters of galaxies formed and developed into what we see today,” said Ananda Hota, of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), in Taiwan.
Located in a galaxy cluster about 1.7 billion light-years, Speca (an acronym for Spiral-host Episodic radio galaxy tracing Cluster Accretion) made its presence known to Ananda’s researches via an image which joined data from the visible-light Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the FIRST survey done with the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope. Subsequent observations with the Lulin optical telescope in Taiwan and ultraviolet data from NASA’s GALEX satellite verified the lobes of material were part of an active, star-forming galaxy. Ananda’s team further refined their studies with information from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS), then made new observations with the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India. Each telescope set provided more and more clues to solving the puzzle.
“By using these multiple sets of data, we found clear evidence for three distinct epochs of jet activity,” Ananda explained. But the real excitement began when the low-frequency nature of the oldest, outermost lobes was examined. It was an artifact which should have disappeared with time.
“We think these old, relic lobes have been ‘re-lighted’ by shock waves from rapidly moving material falling into the cluster of galaxies as the cluster continues to accrete matter,” said Ananda. “All these phenomena combined in one galaxy make Speca and its neighbors a valuable laboratory for studying how galaxies and clusters evolved billions of years ago.”
Sandeep K. Sirothia of India’s National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA-TIFR) said, “The ongoing low-frequency TIFR GMRT Sky Survey will find many more relic radio lobes of past black hole activity and energetic phenomena in clusters of galaxies like those we found in Speca.” Also, Govind Swarup of NCRA-TIFR, who is not part of the team, described the finding as “an outstanding discovery that is very important for cluster formation models and highlights the importance of sensitive observations at meter wavelengths provided by the GMRT.”
Stay close to your radio, folks… Who knows what we’ll hear in the future!
