Universe Today

February 20, 2011April 26, 2016 by Anne Minard

Film Review: Nostalgia for the Light (in Atacama)

The ESO's La Silla telescope site in the southern Atacama Desert, Chile. Credit: Iztok Boncina/ESO

[/caption]

It’s difficult enough to imagine stark white telescope domes towering over a parched brown landscape made even more arid by the near-constant whistle of high-altitude winds. It’s stranger still to consider that in the desert below those domes, tough and grieving women have been searching in vain for decades for the sun-bleached remains of loved ones stolen from them, killed and dumped in the void by Pinochet’s army.

Acclaimed Chilean film director Patricio Guzmán has woven these stories together into a documentary called Nostalgia de la Luz, or Nostalgia for the Light, that is both touching and stunning, human and other-worldly, emotional — and hopeful.

The film played at the Toronto International Film Festival and at Cannes before lighting up a packed theater at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning in Boulder, Colorado, a community with a special fondness for space science owing partly to the presence of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Ball Aerospace, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and the Southwest Research Institute.

In fact Jason Glenn, an astronomer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, took the podium for a few moments before the start of the film to announce plans for the Cornell-Caltech-Atacama (CCAT) telescope proposed to go atop the Chilean mountain Cerro Chajnantor — and to request donations toward its construction. CCAT, a submillimeter telescope, will be used to probe primeval galaxies, star formation and extra-solar planetary systems.

The film opens with awe-inspiring images of galaxies, close-up views of the pockmarked lunar surface, and eerily beautiful shots of the vast Atacama. The desert lies west of the Andes Mountains in Chile, and is generally regarded as the driest place on Earth. That, plus its high altitude, make it a perfect place for astronomy. The Atacama supports the ESO’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and numerous other instruments. Many Chileans, the film intimates, grow up loving astronomy.

Meanwhile the people of Chile continue to heal from Pinochet’s bloody rule beginning in the early 1970s, when thousands of his political opponents were taken from their families and disappeared. The film captures the perspectives of people on all sides of the tragedy — from the grieving mothers and wives, the archeologists working to decipher both the recent and distant human past, survivors of Pinochet’s concentration camps and even astronomers who, tucked in offices underneath the massive telescope domes, might not seem to have much in common with the grieving women. But they do.

Gaspar Galaz, an astronomer at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, says in the film that both he and the women pursue quests to learn history; they’re all chasing rare clues in dauntingly vast spaces. Galaz peers far across the cosmos to study diffuse galaxies, whose origins are unknown, and the women comb the 40,600 square mile (105,000 km²) desert for minute fragments of bone. The difference: At the end of his workday, Galaz says, he can get a good night’s sleep, “but these women must have trouble sleeping after they search for human remains.”

Nostalgia de la Luz is worth seeing for any of its parts — the glimpses through the powerful Atacama telescopes, the desert scenes, the cultural insights or the beautifully human and optimistic ending, which I won’t give away here. Taken together, the film’s elements are an experience not to be missed.

Several trailers for Nostalgia de la Luz are available on YouTube; upcoming showtimes include, according to Facebook, March 8 and 9 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, March 18 at the IFC Film Center in New York and April 22-28 at Landmark’s Nuart Theater in LA. Today’s showing was at the Boulder International Film Festival.

February 20, 2011December 24, 2015 by Mark Mortimer

Blogging the Moon

The Earth’s Moon beckons just above us like a seductive siren. For some it’s the next step in humankind’s journey into space. One such advocate is Paul Spudis who has written the book “Blogging the Moon – The Once and Future Moon Collection“. Within it is a compilation of short essays together with rejoinders that collectively put the reader into the midst of today’s arguments about where or even if our future extends beyond the Earth’s surface.

This book’s main argument in support of using the Moon as our next step is that in so doing, we can use non-earth resources while accruing more knowledge. Yes, we would need to build the infrastructure to acquire and process material on the Moon. But, conceivably we could take this capability and the extracted resources to continue elsewhere. Potential follow-on locales might include asteroids, on to Mars and beyond. So the argument goes. Central to the book is the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration presented by President Reagan. The principal antagonist is NASA, described as an organization that exists to complete isolated programs and nurture self-absorbed bureaucracy. This is heady stuff for a blog and a book.

While the argument about which is the best next step into space remains current and ongoing, this book’s presentation makes almost as much a statement as the contents. Traditionalists expect a non-fiction book to present a claim resulting from cohesive, comprehensive supporting evidence. This and a conclusion would serve to convince the reader that the author’s claim is reasonable and worthy. A blog on the other hand is more a personal daily journal based upon an individual’s experience and interest. When a blog includes responses then it becomes a much more fluid venue like an open ended discussion. Hence, this book about blogging the Moon is as if the reader is a fly on the wall while various avatars in a virtual room espouse errors and preferences for space exploration and development.

If the reader accepts this approach then this book has some great material. One benefit is that apparently the author is well known in the aerospace community, especially with regard to selenic geology. Thus, his essays have got a lot of appropriate detail as well as many online references. The book presents each essay as a chapter usually a couple of pages at most. The chapter then concludes with presumably lightly or unabridged rejoinders from the blogosphere. Again, with the author being well known, many of the responders are also well known in the community, assuming that they used their real names. This makes for interesting reading as a large amount of disparate material gets introduced. Each essay thus has many pro and contrary views, sidebars and verbal ripostes that say as much about consensus forming as they do for using the Moon next.

Should you prefer books the old fashioned way then this book is likely not for you. Aside from each essay being related to the Moon as our next step, there is little cohesion. Much is made of water/ice kind of being detected on the surface. Much is also made of the need (or not) of heavy launch vehicles, flexible exploration paths, fiscal accounting and hot nights in India. Taken together, yes, they all relate to the Moon and humans using it as stepping stone into space. But, on completing the book, there’s no reason to go jump into the street yelling eureka as no conclusion is apparent. Further, the blog is still live on the web so there’s nothing stopping you from visiting and providing your own comments to current posts.

Yet, the Moon still beckons. Almost every night it presents a different face, enticing, scintillating, inviting. We’ve been there and as Paul Spudis well declares in his book “Blogging the Moon – The Once and Future Moon Collection“, we need to go back. The book describes why we can and need to make an impression there that goes beyond planting a flag. The Moon will continue to beckon; it is up to humanity to respond.

Click here to read more reviews or buy this book from Amazon.com.

February 19, 2011December 24, 2015 by Ken Kremer

Spectacular ATV Kepler Launch Photo Captured from Orbiting ISS

This remarkable photo was taken by ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli from the ISS on 16 February 2011, just minutes after ATV Johannes Kepler lifted off on board an Ariane 5 from Kourou at 22:50 UTC. It shows the rising exhaust trail of Ariane, still in its initial vertical trajectory. The trail can be seen as a thin streak framed just beneath the Station's remote manipulator arm. Credits: ESA/ NASA

[/caption]

Have you ever seen a space launch from orbit ?

Check out the spectacular launch photo (above) of the Johannes Kepler ATV streaking skyward atop an Ariane 5 rocket as captured by astronaut Paolo Nespoli from his unparalleled vantage point looking out the windows aboard the International Space Station (ISS), in orbit some 350 km above Earth.

The launch photo shows the rising exhaust trail from the rocket just minutes after blast off of the Ariane booster on Feb. 16 from the ESA rocket base in Kourou, French Guiana, South America. The rocket was still on a vertical ascent trajectory to orbit. Additional launch photos below from space and Earth.

Photo captured on 16 February 2011 from the real-time video from the Ariane 5 launcher during the flight V200 during the time of jettisoning the boosters.

The photo vividly illustrates the maturity of the European space effort since the launch base, Ariane booster rocket, Kepler payload and astronaut Nespoli all stem from Europe and are crucial to the future life of the ISS.

Ariane 5 rocket at the Launch pad at Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana with Johannes Kepler ATV bolted on top prior to Feb. 16 blast off.

Kepler is set to dock at the ISS on Feb. 24 and an on time arrival is essential because of an impending orbital traffic jam.

Space Shuttle Discovery is due to link up with the ISS just six hous after Kepler if the orbiter launches according to schedule on Feb. 22.

Everything is nominal with Kepler’s spacecraft systems and orbital performance at this time say European Space Agency (ESA) officials, including the deployment of ATV’s four large solar wings.

Ariane 5 liftoff with Johannes Kepler ATV

The ATV, or Automated Transfer Vehicle, is a European built resupply vessel designed to transport essential cargo and provisions to the ISS. It is Europe’s contribution to stocking up the ISS.

Kepler is carrying carries more than seven metric tons of supplies and cargo for the ISS and will be used to reboost the outpost to a higher orbit during its planned four month mission.

“ATV is a truly European spacecraft. Flying it requires experts from ESA, partner agencies and industry across half a dozen countries,” said ESA’s Bob Chesson, Head of the Human Spaceflight Operations Department.

“Getting it built, into orbit and operating it in flight to docking requires a lot of hard work and dedication from hundreds of people.”

The ATV is named after Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), the German astronomer and mathematician who is best known for discovering the laws of planetary motion. NASA also named its powerful new planet hunting space telescope after Kepler, which recently discovered the first earth sized planets orbiting inside the habitable zone.

After the shuttle is forcibly retired later this year in 2011, the very survival and continued use of the ISS will be completely dependent on a steady train of cargo and payloads lofted by unmanned resupply vessels including the ATV from Europe, HTV from Japan, Progress from Russia and commercial carriers such as SpaceX and Orbital Sciences.

Photos of Ariane rockets rising exhaust trail from Feb. 16 ATV launch photographed from the ISS. Credits: ESA/ NASA

European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Paolo Nespoli, Expedition 26 flight engineer, conducts a test run with the French/CNES neuroscientific research experiment 3D-Space (SAP) in the Columbus laboratory of the International Space Station.

February 19, 2011December 24, 2015 by Steve Nerlich

Astronomy Without A Telescope – Black Holes: The Early Years

High Mass Xray binaries were probably commonly in the early universe and the black hole partner may have shaped the destiny of the later universe. Credit: ESO.

[/caption]

There’s a growing view that black holes in the early universe may have been the seeds around which most of today’s big galaxies (now with supermassive black holes within) first grew. And taking a step further back, it might also be the case that black holes were key to reionizing the early interstellar medium – which then influenced the large scale structure of today’s universe.

To recap those early years… First was the Big Bang – and for about three minutes everything was very compact and hence very hot – but after three minutes the first protons and electrons formed and for the next 17 minutes a proportion of those protons interacted to form helium nuclei – until at 20 minutes after the Big Bang, the expanding universe became too cool to maintain nucleosynthesis. From there, the protons and the helium nuclei and the electrons just bounced around for the next 380,000 years as a very hot plasma.

There were photons too, but there was little chance for these photons to do anything much except be formed and then immediately reabsorbed by an adjacent particle in that broiling hot plasma. But at 380,000 years, the expanding universe cooled enough for the protons and the helium nuclei to combine with electrons to form the first atoms – and suddenly the photons were left with empty space in which to shoot off as the first light rays – which today we can still detect as the cosmic microwave background.

What followed was the so-called dark ages until around half a billion years after the Big Bang, the first stars began to form. It’s likely that these stars were big, like really big, since the cool, stable hydrogen (and helium) atoms available readily aggregated and accreted. Some of these early stars may have been so big that they quickly blew themselves to pieces as pair-instability supernovae. Others were just very big and collapsed into black holes – many of them having too much self-gravity to permit a supernova explosion to blow any material out from the star.

And it’s about here that the reionization story starts. The cool, stable hydrogen atoms of the early interstellar medium didn’t stay cool and stable for very long. In a smaller universe full of densely-packed massive stars, these atoms were quickly reheated, causing their electrons to dissociate and their nuclei to become free ions again. This created a low density plasma – still very hot, but too diffuse to be opaque to light any more.

Well, really from ions to atoms to ions again - hence the term reionization. The only difference is that at half a billion years since the Big Bang, the reionized plasma of the interstellar medium was so diffuse that it remained - and still remains - transparent to radiation. Credit: New Scientist.

It’s likely that this reionization step then limited the size to which new stars could grow – as well as limiting opportunities for new galaxies to grow – since hot, excited ions are less likely to aggregate and accrete than cool, stable atoms. Reionization may have contributed to the current ‘clumpy’ distribution of matter – which is organized into generally large, discrete galaxies rather than an even spread of stars everywhere.

And it’s been suggested that early black holes – actually black holes in high mass X-ray binaries – may have made a significant contribution to the reionization of the early universe. Computer modelling suggests that the early universe, with a tendency towards very massive stars, would be much more likely to have black holes as stellar remnants, rather than neutron stars or white dwarfs. Also, those black holes would more often be in binaries than in isolation (since massive stars more often form multiple systems than do small stars).

So with a massive binary where one component is a black hole – the black hole will quickly begin to accumulate a large accretion disk composed of matter drawn from the other star. Then that accretion disk will begin to radiate high energy photons, particularly at X-ray energy levels.

While the number of ionizing photons emitted by an accreting black hole is probably similar to that of its bright, luminous progenitor star, it would be expected to emit a much higher proportion of high energy X-ray photons – with each of those photons potentially heating and ionizing multiple atoms in its path, while a luminous star’s photon’s might only reionize one or two atoms.

So there you go. Black holes… is there anything they can’t do?

Further reading: Mirabel et al Stellar black holes at the dawn of the universe.

February 19, 2011December 24, 2015 by Anne Minard

Continent-Wide Telescope Array Now Seeing 450 Million Light-Years Into Space

Artist's conception of Milky Way, showing locations of star-forming regions whose distances were recently measured. CREDIT: M. Reid, Harvard-Smithsonian CfA; R. Hurt, SSC/JPL/Caltech, NRAO/AUI/NSF

[/caption]

Kitt Peak. Los Alamos. St. Croix. Pie Town.

What do these places have in common? They each house one of 10 giant telescopes in the Very Large Baseline Array, a continent-spanning collection of telescopes that’s flexing its optical muscles, reaching farther into space — with more precision — than any other telescope in the world.

And today, at the 177th annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC, VLBA researchers announced an amazing feat: They’ve used the VLBA to peer, with stunning accuracy, three times as far into the universe as they had just two years ago. New measurements with the VLBA have placed a galaxy called NGC 6264 (coordinates below) at a distance of 450 million light-years from Earth, with an uncertainty of no more than 9 percent. This is the farthest distance ever directly measured, surpassing a measurement of 160 million light-years to another galaxy in 2009.

VLBA telescope locations, courtesy of NRAO/AUI

Previously, distances beyond our own Galaxy have been estimated through indirect methods. But the direct seeing power of the VLBA scraps the need for assumptions, noted James Braatz, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

The VLBA provides the greatest ability to see fine detail, called resolving power, of any telescope in the world. It can produce images hundreds of times more detailed than those from the Hubble Space Telescope, at a power equivalent to sitting in New York and reading a newspaper in Los Angeles. VLBA sites include Kitt Peak, Arizona; Los Alamos and Pie Town, New Mexico; St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, Mauna Kea, Hawaii; Brewster, Washington; Fort Davis, Texas; Hancock, New Hampshire; North Liberty, Iowa; and Owens Valley in California. Sure, I could include pictures of the scopes in Hawaii or the Virgin Islands. But Pie Town, besides hosting the Very Large Array, also has two fun restaurants (the Daily Pie and the Pie-O-Neer) with really amazing pie. And an annual pie-eating festival. So it wins:

The VLBA site at Pie Town, N.M., courtesy of NRAO/AUI.

Tripling the visible “yardstick” into space bears favorably on numerous areas of astrophysics, including determining the nature of dark energy, which constitutes 70 percent of the Universe. The VLBA is also redrawing the map of the Milky Way and is poised to yield tantalizing new information about extrasolar planets, the NRAO points out.

Fine-tuning the measurement of ever-greater distances is vital to determining the expansion rate of the Universe, which helps theorists narrow down possible explanations for the nature of dark energy. Different models of Dark Energy predict different values for the expansion rate, known as the Hubble Constant.

“Solving the Dark Energy problem requires advancing the precision of cosmic distance measurements, and we are working to refine our observations and extend our methods to more galaxies,” Braatz said. Measuring more-distant galaxies is vital, because the farther a galaxy is, the more of its motion is due to the expansion of the Universe rather than to random motions.

As for the map of our own galaxy, the direct VLBA measurements are improving on earlier estimates by as much as a factor of two. The clearer observations have already revealed the Milky Way has four spiral arms, not two as previously thought.

Mark Reid, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led an earlier VLBA study revealing that the Milky Way is also rotating faster than previously believed — and that it’s as massive as Andromeda.

Reid’s team is now observing the Andromeda Galaxy in a long-term project to determine the direction and speed of its movement through space. “The standard prediction is that the Milky Way and Andromeda will collide in a few billion years. By measuring Andromeda’s actual motion, we can determine with much greater accuracy if and when that will happen,” Reid said.

The VLBA is also being used for a long-term, sensitive search of 30 stars to find the subtle gravitational tug that will reveal orbiting planets. That four-year program, started in 2007, is nearing its completion. The project uses the VLBA along with NRAO’s Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the largest fully-steerable dish antenna in the world. Early results have ruled out any companions the size of brown dwarfs for three of the stars, and the astronomers are analyzing their data as the observations continue.

Ongoing upgrades in electronics and computing have enhanced the VLBA’s capabilities. With improvements now nearing completion, the VLBA will be as much as 5,000 times more powerful as a scientific tool than the original VLBA of 1993.

NGC 6264 Coordinates, from DOCdb: 16h 57m 16.08s; +27° 50′ 58.9″

Source: A press release from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, via the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Not to be confused with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which now conducting its annual meeting in Washington, DC — and where the VLBA results were presented.

February 18, 2011December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

NASA Sets STS-133 Launch for February 24

Shuttle Discovery on the launchpad. Credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe Today.

[/caption]

Following a Flight Readiness Review today, NASA and Space Shuttle Program managers announced that space shuttle Discovery is ready to launch next week Thursday to finally send the STS-133 mission to the International Space Station. Launch is now scheduled for Feb. 24, at 4:50 p.m. EST. “We had a really thorough review today,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for Space Operations. “Things are looking pretty good.”

The STS-133 crew will bring the Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM) to the station. The PMM was converted from the multi-purpose logistics module Leonardo and will provide additional storage for the station crew. Later, experiments may be conducted in the module, in fields like fluid physics, materials science, biology and biotechnology.

The first human-like robot will also make the trip to the ISS. Robonaut 2 will become a permanent resident of the station. In addition, Discovery will bring critical spare parts and the Express Logistics Carrier 4, an external platform that holds large equipment.

Managers, engineers and contractors went over the detailed analysis and testing performed on the “stringer” or support beams of Discovery’s external fuel tank during the session and reviewed the repairs and modifications made.

Mike Moses, chairman of the Mission Management Team, described the fix as a “a big metal band-aid” to give the metal beams extra support.

The processes of the repairs and testing involved people throughout the agency and its centers, and the managers at today’s press conference lauded the teams.

“I can’t say enough about the work the teams have done,” Gerstenmaier said. “They’ve done just an outstanding job to get us to where we are now ready to launch.”

The crew also underwent a change recently when astronaut Steve Bowen was assigned to take the place of Tim Kopra who was injured in a bicycle accident.

“Overall the crew was in really good shape and felt really comfortable with this change,” said Moses.

The managers at the FRR approved the February 24 launch date even thought the European resupply ship – the ATV Johannes Kepler — is scheduled to dock at the space station just six hours before Discovery’s launch. Moses said they are confident the ATV will dock, but will be ready to modify the shuttle launch should there be any problems with the ATV.

“If they run into a problem in docking we will discuss the issue in real time,” Moses said at the press conference. “We still might launch that day, we might not, depending on the situation. But the space station program would really like to have the ATV docked during this mission.”

Discovery now sits on Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ready for launch. The countdown will begin Monday at 3 p.m. “We’re in outstanding shape out at the pad,” said Mike Leinbach, shuttle launch director.

February 18, 2011December 24, 2015 by Tammy Plotner

Sunspot Activity Hasn’t Stopped Yet

Sunspot 1161 on 02-17-11 by John Chumack

[/caption]

According to SpaceWeather: “Fast-growing active region 1161 erupted this morning, producing an M6.6-class solar flare at 1011 UT. The almost-X category blast was one of the strongest flares in years and continued the week-long trend of high solar activity.” Just how awesome is that? Then take a look at these white light solar images done by John Chumack…

While today’s activity isn’t supposed to impact Earth in a negative manner, who knows what it might produce in the days ahead? Just ask NOAA!

“A G1 (minor) geomagnetic storm continues. What might have been three hits of shocks/CMEs seems to have merged to be just one interplanetary shock/CME structure. Look for about another day’s worth of geomagnetic activity, pending additional treats in the solar wind. Elsewhere Region 1158 had another R2 (moderate) radio blackout, and fast-growing new Region 1162 likely generated an R1 (minor) event.”

Sunspots 1158 on 02-17-11 — Sunspot 1158 on 02-17-11 by John Chumack

With 1158 nearing the limb and wonderfully active, now is the time for solar observers to try and catch the “Wilson Effect” – an effect in which the penumbra of a sunspot appears narrower in the direction toward the Sun’s center.

While you’re at it, it doesn’t hurt to keep watch for auroral activity tonight and in the days ahead – despite the lunar interference. With satellite communications impacted in my area, I’m anxious to see what the nights – and days – bring!

Many thanks to John Chumack of Galactic Images for sharing!

February 18, 2011December 24, 2015 by Anne Minard

First-Time Solar System Mosaic From the Inside Out

MESSENGER's new solar system portrait, from the inside out

[/caption]

Say cheese! The MESSENGER spacecraft has captured the first portrait of our Solar System from the inside looking out. The images, captured Nov. 3 and 16, 2010, were snapped with the Wide Angle Camera (WAC) and Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of MESSENGER’s Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS).

All of the planets are visible except for Uranus and Neptune, which at distances of 3.0 and 4.4 billion kilometers were too faint to detect with even the longest camera exposure time of 10 seconds. Their positions are indicated. The dwarf-planet Pluto, smaller and farther away, would have been even more difficult to observe.

Earth’s Moon and Jupiter’s Galilean satellites (Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, and Io) can be seen in the NAC image insets. Our Solar System’s perch on a spiral arm provided a beautiful view of part of the Milky Way galaxy, bottom center.

The following is a graphic showing the positions of the planets when the graphic was acquired:

The new mosaic provides a complement to the Solar System portrait – that one from the outside looking in – taken by Voyager 1 in 1990.

These six narrow-angle color images were made from the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1, which was more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system which shows six of the planets. Mercury is too close to the sun to be seen. Mars was not detectable by the Voyager cameras due to scattered sunlight in the optics, and Pluto was not included in the mosaic because of its small size and distance from the sun. These blown-up images, left to right and top to bottom are Venus, Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. The background features in the images are artifacts resulting from the magnification. The images were taken through three color filters -- violet, blue and green -- and recombined to produce the color images. Jupiter and Saturn were resolved by the camera but Uranus and Neptune appear larger than they really are because of image smear due to spacecraft motion during the long (15 second) exposure times. Earth appears to be in a band of light because it coincidentally lies right in the center of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixels in size. Venus was 0.11 pixel in diameter. The planetary images were taken with the narrow-angle camera (1500 mm focal length). Credit: NASA/JPL

“Obtaining this portrait was a terrific feat by the MESSENGER team,” says Sean Solomon, MESSENGER principal investigator and a researcher at the Carnegie Institution. “This snapshot of our neighborhood also reminds us that Earth is a member of a planetary family that was formed by common processes four and a half billion years ago. Our spacecraft is soon to orbit the innermost member of the family, one that holds many new answers to how Earth-like planets are assembled and evolve.”

Source: MESSENGER

February 18, 2011December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

NASA Weighs Risks of Unique Photo-Op at Space Station

In this computer-generated representation, a space shuttle is docked to a completed and fully operational International Space Station (ISS). Credit: NASA

[/caption]

If all goes well and space shuttle Discovery arrives at the International Space Station the end of February, there will be a distinctive configuration: all the international partners will have a vehicle docked to the completed ISS. With the shuttle program about to retire, this configuration will be unique enough – this is the only time it will happen during the shuttle program — that NASA is considering putting three cosmonauts/astronauts in one of the Soyuz capsules that are docked to the station, have them undock and fly around to take pictures of the entire complex.

The Soyuz could photograph the station, showing the ISS in its final, completed configuration, with the shuttle attached, along with the Russian Progress and Soyuz, the European ATV and the Japanese HTV-1.

NASA managers, engineers and contractors are meeting today, Feb. 18 in a Flight Readiness Review to discuss the photo op. Of course, the Russian space agency would have to go along with the idea, as the task would not be insignificant.

Anytime a spacecraft undocks, there is the possibility of a problem or malfunction, and with people involved, the problems multiply fairly quickly. If for some reason the crew could not re-dock, they would have to deorbit and return to Earth, and the ISS crew would all of a sudden be reduced from six to three. Of course, the shuttle crew would be there, but their stay would be limited.

If the plans gets the OK, the crew doing the photo-op mission would ber Alexander Kaleri, Oleg Skripochka and Expedition 26 commander Scott Kelly.

Atlantis undocks after its first visit at Mir. Credit: Roscosmos/NASA

But you have to admit, the pictures and videos would be spectacular, and as things stand now, this would be the one and only chance to get a picture like this, a sort of family photo of the station and all the vehicles that support it.

The feat is not without precedence, however. The Russians took a similar photo on July 4, 1995, when the shuttle Atlantis was docked to the Mir space station, the first time a shuttle visited the Russian space station. Just before Atlantis undocked to return home, cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai Budarin undocked in a Soyuz spacecraft and photographed the shuttle’s departure from a distance of about 300 feet.
There was a computer problem during the maneuver, however, and the cosmonauts had to dock manually and everything turned out just fine. And the picture was great, too.

The NASA Twitter feed reporting from today’s FRR meeting said the decision to do the photo op will probably not be made until during the STS-133 mission. NASA management is also deciding today when the Discovery mission will actually launch – right now it is scheduled for February 24, 2011 but they are weighing waiting until February 25, as the ATV Johnnes Kepler will arrive at the ISS on the 24th about 6 hours before the shuttle is scheduled to launch. If there were any problems with the ATV, the shuttle might have to stand down.

February 17, 2011April 13, 2022 by Ken Kremer

Sun Erupts with Enormous X2 Solar Flare

Active region 1158 let loose with an X2.2 flare late on February 15, taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory in the extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 193 Angstroms. Much of the vertical line in the image is caused by the bright flash overwhelming the SDO imager. Credit: NASA/SDO

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, [and the Stardust flyby of Comet Tempel 1] the Sun erupted with a massive X-Class flare, the most powerful of all solar events on February 14 at 8:56 p.m. EST . This was the first X-Class flare in Solar Cycle 24 and the most powerful X-ray flare in more than four years.

The video above shows the flare as imaged by the AIA instrument at 304 Angstroms on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. More graphic videos below show the flare in the extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 193 Angstroms and as a composite with SOHO’s coronagraph.

Spaceweather Update: A CME hit Earth’s magnetic field at approximately 0100 UT on Feb. 18th (8:00 pm EST on Feb. 17th). Send me or comment your aurora photos

The eruption registered X2 on the Richter scale of solar flares and originated from Active Region 1138 in the sun’s southern hemisphere. The flare directly follows several M-class and C-class flares over the past few days which were less powerful. The explosion also let loose a coronal mass ejection (CME) headed for Earth’s orbit. It was speeding at about 900 Km/second.
CME’s can disrupt communications systems and the electrical power grid and cause long lasting radiation storms.

According to a new SDO update, the particle cloud from this solar storm is weaker than first expected and may produce some beautiful aurora in the high northern and southern latitudes on Feb. 17 (tonight).

According to spaceweather.com, skywatchers in the high latitudes should be alert for auroras after nightfall Feb. 17 from this moderately strong geomagnetic storm.

Send me your aurora reports and photos to post here

Sources: SDO website, spaceweather.com

NASA SDO – Big, Bright Flare February 15, 2011

Video Caption: Active region 1158 let loose with an X2.2 flare at 0153 UT or 8:50 pm ET on February 15, 2011, the largest flare since Dec. 2006 and the biggest flare so far in Solar Cycle 24. Active Region 1158 is in the southern hemisphere, which has been lagging the north in activity but now leads in big flares! The movie shows a close-up of the flaring region taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory in the extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 193 Angstroms. Much of the vertical line in the image and the staggered lines making an “X” are caused by the bright flash overwhelming our imager. A coronal mass ejection was also associated with the flare. The movie shows activity over about two days (Feb. 13-15, 2011). Since the active region was facing Earth, there is a good chance that Earth will receive some effects from these events, with some possibility of mid-latitude aurora Feb. 16 – 18. Credit: NASA SDO

X2 flare Video combo from SDO and SOHO

Video caption: The X2 flare of Feb. 15, 2011 seen by SDO (in extreme ultraviolet light) enlarged and superimposed on SOHO’s coronagraph that shows the faint edge of a “halo” coronal mass ejection as it races away from the Sun. The video covers about 11 hours

[/caption]