Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Looking for Something to do this Weekend? SpaceUP!

Looking for something spacey to do this weekend? If you live near either Houston, Texas or San Diego, California, you’re in luck, as both cities are hosting a SpaceUp conference – but anyone from anywhere can also attend either event online. SpaceUp is an “unconference,” where participants decide the topics, schedule, and structure of the event. But there will also scheduled events and a chance to talk with commercial spaceflight representatives and even an astronaut.

At unconferences like SpaceUp, everyone who attends is encouraged to participate by giving a talk, moderating a panel, or starting a discussion. It’s like “hallway conversations” turn into full-fledged topics. But there are also events lined up, and the agendas have now been announced for each conference.

Houston’s SpaceUp conference will be held on February 12-13 at the Lunar & Planetary Institute (LPI). Organizers say the conference “will include the rare opportunity to interact with the companies and people creating the future of spaceflight. Commercial spaceflight companies in attendance will include Boeing, United Launch Alliance, ATK, SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, and Orbital Sciences. NASA representatives will also be on hand to demonstrate moon rocks, a NASA Space Exploration Vehicle and astronaut Clay Anderson will discuss using social media to communicate his spaceflight experiences to the world.”

Attendees will have all weekend to interact with scientists, engineers, developers, designers, musicians, and students interested in guiding the future of spaceflight. Children are free with the purchase of an adult ticket and are encouraged to attend. Breakfast and lunch will be free on both days and snacks will also be provided.

The event will be livestreamed on February 12-13 at http://spaceuphouston.org. You can purchase a special online package where you can get some of the “swag” associated with the conference.

For the San Diego event, the San Diego Space Society and the UCSD Astrophysics Club are hosting their event at The Loft at UC San Diego, with a similar format.

Kids have their own activities and are free with a parent registration. The event will be livesteamed at SpaceVidCast.

Learn more about SpaceUp San Diego at this link.

Future SpaceUp events are planned for Washington DC and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Spitzer’s Stunning New View of the North American Nebula

This swirling landscape of stars is known as the North American nebula. In visible light, the region resembles North America, but in this new infrared view from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the continent disappears. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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In visible light, the North American nebula resembles its namesake continent. But looking at it in the infrared spectrum, a whole new perspective explodes into view. Clouds of dust and gas come to life, as light from massive young star heats and shape the clouds, and dramatic clusters of baby stars which can only be seen in infrared burst into view.

“One of the things that makes me so excited about this image is how different it is from the visible image, and how much more we can see in the infrared than in the visible,” said Luisa Rebull of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. Rebull is lead author of a paper about the observations, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. “The Spitzer image reveals a wealth of detail about the dust and the young stars here.”

Rebull and her team have identified more than 2,000 new, candidate young stars in the region. There were only about 200 known before. Because young stars grow up surrounded by blankets of dust, they are hidden in visible-light images. Spitzer’s infrared detectors pick up the glow of the dusty, buried stars.

This new view of the North American nebula combines both visible and infrared light observations, taken by the Digitized Sky Survey and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, respectively, into a single vivid picture. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Combing infrared data with light from other parts of the spectrum gives astronomers a complete picture of star formation. Each different combination of observations gives insights into star formation.

But in Spitzer’s infrared view, the continent disappears. Instead, a swirling landscape of dust and young stars comes into view.

In this image, astronomers can see stars at all stages of life, from the early years when it is swaddled in dust to early adulthood, when it has become a young parent to a family of developing planets. Sprightly “toddler” stars with jets can also be identified in Spitzer’s view.

“This is a really busy area to image, with stars everywhere, from the North American complex itself, as well as in front of and behind the region,” said Rebull. “We refer to the stars that are not associated with the region as contamination. With Spitzer, we can easily sort this contamination out and clearly distinguish between the young stars in the complex and the older ones that are unrelated.”

There are a couple of mysteries about the North American Nebula still to be solved: astronomers think there must be more stars in the “Gulf of Mexico” region that must dominate the nebula and provide the main source of “power.” There is a dark tangle of clouds there that even Spitzers powerful infrared eyes can’t penetrate, but some light appears to be coming from behind that region, in the same way that sunlight creeps out from behind a rain cloud.

The nebula’s distance from Earth is also a mystery. Current estimates put it at about 1,800 light-years from Earth. Spitzer will refine this number by finding more stellar members of the North American complex.

See more info on the JPL website, where you can download full resolution versions of the images seen here, and more views of the North American nebula.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Astronomy Cast Ep. 213: Supermassive Black Holes

Supermassive Black Hole

It’s now believed that there’s a supermassive black hole lurking at the heart of every galaxy in the Universe. These monstrous black holes can contain hundreds of millions of times the mass of our own Sun, with event horizons better than the Solar System. They’re the source of the most energetic particles in the Universe, the brightest objects in the Universe, and the place where the laws of physics go to get mangled.

Click here to download the episode.

Or subscribe to: astronomycast.com/podcast.xml with your podcatching software.

Supermassive Black Holes shownotes and transcript.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Astronomy Cast Ep. 212: GPS Navigation

Handheld GPS Navigation Device

The in previous podcast, we talked about the old way navigators used to find their way around the planet; by looking at objects in the sky, and doing some tricky math. The new navigation system, of course, is the Global Positioning System, and it helps you find your spot on the planet with amazing accuracy. Let’s see where the system came from, and how it works.

Click here to download the episode.

Or subscribe to: astronomycast.com/podcast.xml with your podcatching software.

GPS Navigation shownotes and transcript.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Video Visualization of Kepler Exoplanet Data

This is really nifty: a visualization of the 1,235 exoplanet candidates observed by Kepler in the recently released data, created by Jer Thorp. In the video, all the candidates are shown as if orbiting a single star – just for the purposes of comparisons. The size of the colored dot is proportional to the size of the planet, and two of the most promising candidates for habitability are highlighted (KOI 326.01 and KOI 314.02).

You can see more visualizations on Boing Boing, Jer Thorp’s Vimeo site, and Ian Musgrave on Astroblog has some other links to visualizations and other things done with the Kepler data.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Chandra Captures Giant Ring of Black Holes

Arp 147 contains a spiral galaxy (right) that collided with an elliptical galaxy (left), triggering a wave of star formation. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/S.Rappaport et al, Optical: NASA/STScI

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From a Chandra press release:

Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes a new image of a ring — not of jewels — but of black holes. This composite image of Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies located about 430 million light years from Earth, shows X-rays from the NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue) produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md.

Arp 147 contains the remnant of a spiral galaxy (right) that collided with the elliptical galaxy on the left. This collision has produced an expanding wave of star formation that shows up as a blue ring containing in abundance of massive young stars. These stars race through their evolution in a few million years or less and explode as supernovas, leaving behind neutron stars and black holes.

A fraction of the neutron stars and black holes will have companion stars, and may become bright X-ray sources as they pull in matter from their companions. The nine X-ray sources scattered around the ring in Arp 147 are so bright that they must be black holes, with masses that are likely ten to twenty times that of the Sun.

This composite image of Arp 147 shows Chandra X-ray data in pink, Hubble optical data in red, green and blue, ultraviolet GALEX data in green and infrared Spitzer data in red. (Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/S.Rappaport et al, Optical: NASA/STScI)

An X-ray source is also detected in the nucleus of the red galaxy on the left and may be powered by a poorly-fed supermassive black hole. This source is not obvious in the composite image but can easily be seen in the X-ray image. Other objects unrelated to Arp 147 are also visible: a foreground star in the lower left of the image and a background quasar as the pink source above and to the left of the red galaxy.

Infrared observations with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and ultraviolet observations with NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) have allowed estimates of the rate of star formation in the ring. These estimates, combined with the use of models for the evolution of binary stars have allowed the authors to conclude that the most intense star formation may have ended some 15 million years ago, in Earth’s time frame.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Where In The Universe Challenge #136

Ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Here’s #136! Take a look and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. As usual, we’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until later. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess.

And you can also find the answer to last week’s image (a double-ringed crater somewhere in the Universe…) back on the original post.

UPDATE: Answer has now been posted below.

While this image looks like shag carpet, it actually is Mars! Scientists have been noticing changes in Martian sand dunes, and this is one of the images that they’ve been looking at to determine just how much change is going on from season to season on Mars. You can take a closer look and also look at the surrounding region by looking at the various resolutions available of this image on the HiRISE website.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Mysterious Noctilucent Clouds As Seen from Space

Polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs) observed by the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on the Aura satellite. Maps by Robert Simmon. Credit: NAS

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Mysterious “night shining” or noctilucent clouds are beautiful to behold, and are usually seen during the summertime, appearing at sunset. They are thin, wavy ice clouds that form at very high altitudes and reflect sunlight long after the Sun has dropped below the horizon. Scientists don’t know exactly why they form, but continue to observe them – both from Earth and from space. These images were taken by the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite.

Also called polar mesospheric clouds, they are puzzling scientists with their recent dramatic changes. They used to be considered rare, but now the clouds are growing brighter, are seen more frequently, are visible at lower and lower latitudes than ever before, and — as these satellite image reveal — they are now even appearing during the day.

Noctilucent clouds over Kendal Castle, England in June 2010. Credit: Stuart Atkinson

Noctilucent clouds form in an upper layer of the Earth‘s atmosphere called the mesosphere during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer – at an altitude of 80 km (50 miles). They can start forming as early as May, and extend through August. They can also be seen in high latitudes during the summer months in the Southern Hemisphere.

What could the observed changes mean? Some scientists believe they are a good gauge of even the tiniest changes in the atmosphere, as they are extremely sensitive to changes in atmospheric water vapor and temperature. The clouds form only when temperatures drop below -130 degrees Celsius (-200 Fahrenheit), when the scant amount of water high in the atmosphere freezes into ice clouds.

Scientist Matthew DeLand of Science Systems and Applications Inc. and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has been monitoring polar mesospheric clouds with instruments that were actually designed to study ozone, including the OMI, which provides more detailed and frequent observations than previous instruments. This gives DeLand a way to refine his previous measurements of a long-term trend towards more and brighter noctilucent clouds linked to rising greenhouse gases.

These images at the top of this article show OMI measurements of polar mesospheric clouds on July 10, 2007. The clouds, detectable because they are the only things that reflect light in this part of the atmosphere, are shown in white and pink. The Aura satellite travels in a polar orbit, circling from south to north as the Earth turns beneath it. As a result, the satellite gets several opportunities to image the poles every day. This series of images shows the clouds over six consecutive orbits between 7:16 and 15:52 Universal Time. Throughout the day, a wide area of polar mesospheric clouds developed over northern Greenland and Canada, peaking around 10:30 UTC (the third orbit).

Another instrument observing these clouds is the Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet (SBUV) instruments, which have flown on seven different satellites over the past 32 years, and that wealth of data is showing how the clouds change throughout the day.

DeLand now has an index to help correct the SBUV measurement trends to account for the time of day. The correction allows him to develop a more accurate view of the long-term trend. Even with the corrections, the trend indicates that the atmosphere has been responding to increased greenhouse gases over the past 30 years.

The fact that polar mesospheric clouds are getting brighter suggests that the mesosphere is getting colder and more humid, says DeLand. Increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could account for both phenomena.

Sources: NASA Earth Observatory, twice

Posted on by Jason Rhian

Forever Endeavour: USA has Plan to Continue Flying Space Shuttles

If a proposal by United Space Alliance is approved the shuttles Endeavour and Atlantis could continue to fly until at least 2017. Photo Credit: NASA

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She is the youngest orbiter in NASA’s fleet – and she is being looked at to keep her country in space during a period when the U.S. will lack the capability to do so. Both Endeavour and her sister Atlantis are part of a proposal to keep the shuttles flying into 2017. United Space Alliance (USA) submitted the proposal in the latter part of 2010 as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development Round 2 ( CCDev2).

NASA asked aerospace firms for concepts and ideas to advance the cause of commercial crew transportation. NASA has offered to provide funding to companies to look into various manned space flight systems. USA submitted the Commercial Space Transportation System (CSTS) – an adapted version of the shuttle’s Space Transportation System title.

USA wanted to make sure that all options for crew transportation to orbit were on the table. That included keeping the orbiters Atlantis and Endeavour in service until 2017. If this plan succeeds, the shuttles could conduct missions as quickly as by the year 2013. They would have to wait for new external tanks to be produced. Two flights annually would cost approximately $1.5 billion.

Although some are calling the proposal a “long shot” the plan has some very tangible merits. It would limit the “gap” between the end of the end of the shuttle era and when commercial space-taxis could begin ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Keeping the shuttles in service would also help to significantly decrease dependence on the Russian Soyuz for access to the orbiting outpost.

“The CSTS could provide a near-term U.S. solution for crew transport until a new system is ready. It could provide a low-risk approach to bridging the gap in human spaceflight since the program has been flying since 1981 and is well understood,” USA spokesperson Tracy Yates told Universe Today. “It could also provide redundancy for human access to the ISS and therefore ensure the continued viability of an important national asset. The concept has the potential to offer a proven vehicle operated by a seasoned workforce at a market-driven price. It preserves down-mass capability, stabilizes a larger portion of the human spaceflight workforce for future NASA programs and keeps more crew transport dollars at home.”

For the Space Coast this proposal would also have the added benefit of staving off the crippling unemployment that has come as part of the one-two punch of the end of the shuttle era and the cancellation of the Constellation Program.

Although the CSTS has a specific date (2017) mentioned – it is capable of remaining in effect until the new commercial systems come online. This proposal would allow NASA to utilize a proven space vehicle and the overall idea of a “commercial shuttle program” is actually nothing new – the idea has been bandied about since the 90s.

However, while the cost is less than the $3 billion the shuttle program cost in 2010, it is basically the same amount that NASA is paying Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) for 12 missions to the space station. The NewSpace firm has stated that four manned flights would cost approximately $550 million.

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has stated that a flight on the manned version of the Dragon spacecraft would cost about $140 million. Image Credit: SpaceX

“The main thing that this program has going against it is this, what does the shuttle offer that the HTV, ATV, Soyuz and soon commercial craft can’t offer,” said noted space historian David M. Harland. “In today’s economic climate it makes more sense to pay $50 million or so for a seat on Soyuz.”

Posted on by Jason Rhian

Air Force and ULA to launch second X-37B

The second launch of the U.S. Air Force's X-37B OTV is slated for March 4, 2010. Photo Credit: Air Force

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CAPE CANAVERAL – From all appearances the first flight of the U.S. Air Force’s secretive X-37B space plane was a complete success. As such, the Air Force is planning to launch a second Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) on March 4 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on top of a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas rocket. The Air Force has not yet released a specific launch time.

The first flight of an OTV took place on Apr. 22, 2010 on top of an Atlas V 501 rocket and was designated USA-212. Built by Boeing, the spacecraft is unmanned and is in many ways similar to the space shuttle. It has a payload bay, maneuvering thrusters up front and to the rear of the spacecraft and a single, primary engine.

The OTV is different from the space shuttle in that it can operate on-orbit for up to 270 days. During the vehicle’s maiden flight it was spotted by a number of amateur astronomers who verified that the craft changed orbits a number of times before it landed safely at Vandenberg Air Force base on Dec. 3, 2010.

The first X-37B lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station last April. Photo Credit: ULA T.V.

“We are tremendously excited to launch the second OTV space vehicle for the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. Our combined Air Force and ULA mission partner team has worked hard to prepare the Atlas V for this mission which is the first launch of the year for ULA from the east coast in 2011,” said ULA’s Director of Communications, Mike Rein. “I fully expect this launch to be a 100 percent successful mission – just like the first OTV launch in April 2010.”

Originally the OTV was to be deployed from the space shuttle’s payload bay, after the Columbia accident however, it was decided to launch from an EELV instead. At first a Delta II was given the nod to launch the space plane – before the Atlas V was confirmed as the launch vehicle that would be used.

The X-37B is similar in many ways to NASA's space shuttle - but it is far smaller and unmanned. Photo Credit: Air Force

The U.S. Air Force has disclosed only minimal information regarding the first mission and has said little about the upcoming mission as well. The Air Force has stated that the length of the OTV’s mission’s will be determined by the completion rates of the experiments that are onboard. Mission control is based out of Colorado with the 3d Space Experimentation Squadron.

The X-37B is only the second reusable spacecraft that is capable of conducting an automated landing. The only other reusable craft that has demonstrated this capability was Russia’s Buran shuttle which returned safely to Earth on Nov. 15, 1988.

The X-37B was a program initially handled by NASA; however the program was eventually turned over to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Pentagon. The OTV flew several times on Scaled Composites’ White Knight aircraft and was drop tested twice successfully in 2006.

As seen in this diagram, the X-37B is encapsulated within the fairing of the Atlas rocket. Image Credit: ULA
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