Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Congress Considering Additional Shuttle Flight and More Science Funding

A bill directing NASA to fly an additional space shuttle mission to deliver the $1 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the International Space Station cleared the House Science and Technology space and aeronautics subcommittee. The NASA Authorization Act of 2008 (H.R. 6063) was quickly approved sent on to the full committee for consideration. The bill also authorizes a $19.2 billion budget for NASA for 2009, or about $1.6 billion more than the White House is requesting. Additionally, it would authorize an additional $1 billion in 2009 to accelerate development of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and Ares I launcher. Rep. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), the subcommittee’s chairman, introduced the legislation five days ago, stating concerns about the five-year gap between when the shuttle is retired to when the Orion vehicle will be ready to transport crew and supplies to the ISS.

The legislation would still put NASA on pace to return to the Moon around 2020. But it also would provide more funds for climate monitoring satellites, such as a new Landsat satellite, and Glory, which would gather data on aerosols and black carbon in Earth’s atmosphere. The additional shuttle flight to bring the spectrometer science payload to the ISS would ease concerns of the international partners and reverse a controversial cut to the ISS’s science capabilities.

If you are a US citizen and agree with these appropriations, consider contacting your congressmen to encourage their support of this bill.

Text of full bill.

Original News Source: Yahoo News

Posted on by Fraser Cain

What are Telescopes?

This artist’s rendering shows the Extremely Large Telescope in operation on Cerro Armazones in northern Chile. The telescope is shown using lasers to create artificial stars high in the atmosphere. Image: ESO/E-ELT
This artist’s rendering shows the Extremely Large Telescope in operation on Cerro Armazones in northern Chile. The telescope is shown using lasers to create artificial stars high in the atmosphere. Image: ESO/E-ELT

Early theories of the Universe were limited by the lack of telescopes. Many of modern astronomy’s findings would never have been made if it weren’t for Galileo Galilei’s discovery. Pirates and sea captains carried some of the first telescopes: they were simple spyglasses that only magnified your vision about four times and had a very narrow field of view. Today’s telescopes are huge arrays that can view entire quadrants of space. Galileo could never have imagined what he had set into motion.

Here are a few facts about telescopes and below that is a set of links to a plethora of information about them here on Universe Today.

Galileo’s first telescopes were simple arrangements of glass lenses that only magnified to a power of eight, but in less than two years he had improved his invention to 30 power telescope that allowed him to view Jupiter. His discovery is the basis for the modern refractor telescope.

There are two basic types of optical telescopes; reflector and refractor. Both magnify distant light, but in different ways. There is a link below that describes exactly how they differ.

Modern astronomer’s have a wide array of telescopes to make use of. There are optical observation decks all around the world. In addition to those there are radio telescopes, space telescopes, and on and on. Each has a specific purpose within astronomy. Everything you need to know about telescopes is contained in the links below, including how to build your own simple telescope.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Caught in the Act: Astronomers See Supernova As it Explodes

First supernova caught in the act (Alicia Soderberg, Princeton University)

The Swift satellite has made another fortuitous observation. This time, and for the first time ever, astronomers have caught a star in the act of going supernova. These stellar explosions have been observed before, but always after the fireworks were well underway. “For years we have dreamed of seeing a star just as it was exploding, but actually finding one is a once-in-a-lifetime event,” says Alicia Soderberg, from Princeton University, who is leading the international group studying this explosion. “This newly born supernova is going to be the Rosetta Stone of supernova studies for years to come.”

In January of 2008 Soderberg was expecting to study a month-old supernova that was already underway. But as she and her assistant studied the X-ray emissions conveyed from space by NASA’s Swift satellite, they saw an extremely bright light that seemed to jump out of the sky. They didn’t know it at the time, but they had just become the first astronomers to have caught a star in the act of exploding.

“In the old days — last year — people found supernovae by their optical light and then started to study them to understand which stars blow up, what the mechanism is and what they produce,” said Robert Kirshner, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University. “But this is something new — the X-rays come right at the beginning and provide a very early alert to the event.”

Soderberg regards the discovery as a case of extreme serendipity. The satellite was pointing in the right place at the right time, she said, because she had asked Neil Gehrels, Swift’s lead scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to turn it that way to look at another supernova. And while she was away lecturing, she had asked her colleague, Edo Berger, to keep an eye on the data for her.

“It’s a really lucky chain of events — a surprise,” said Soderberg, who is leading the group studying the explosion. “It was all over in a matter of minutes.”

Other observatories also turned their telescopes toward this stellar explosion, making detailed observations of the event, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Palomar’s 60- and 200-nch telescopes, the Gemini Observatory and Kitt 1 Telescope in Hawaii, and the Very Large Array and Apache Point Observatories in New Mexico. This will allow a very detailed study of this event.

A typical supernova occurs when the core of a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel and collapses under its own gravity to form an ultradense object known as a neutron star. The newborn neutron star compresses and then rebounds, triggering a shock wave that plows through the star’s gaseous outer layers and blows the star to smithereens. Until now, astronomers have only been able to observe supernovae brightening days or weeks after the event, when the expanding shell of debris is energized by the decay of radioactive elements forged in the explosion.

Original News Source: Princeton University Press release

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Test Your Knowledge With Another “Where In The Universe” Challenge

It’s Wednesday, so that means its time for another “Where In The Universe” challenge to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. We’ve been busy searching hither and yon for unusual and unique astronomical images to see how well our readers are acquainted with the various locals across the universe. This week’s image is an unusual looking object. Just what is this thing? Could it be an asteroid, a wierd moon, or something you can find on Earth? Hmmm…… Ponder the image for awhile, and no peeking below before you make a guess. If only I could insert some music here, like the “Think!” theme song from the Jeopardy game show. I’ll have to talk to Fraser about that…

Have you made your guess?

And are you sure?

This is a Cassini image of Saturn’s unusual moon Hyperion. Hyperion is the largest highly irregular (non-spherical) body in the solar system. Scientists believe its very likely that is a fragment of a larger body that was broken by a large impact in the distant past. Is this a coral reef in space?

This sponge-like looking moon is a remarkable world strewn with strange craters and basically a strange surface. At the bottom of most craters lies some type of unknown dark material. Astronomers think the dark material might be only tens of meters thick in some places. Hyperion is about 250 kilometers across, rotates chaotically, and has a density so low that it might be mostly hollow inside — it may house a vast system of caverns. Wouldn’t that be fun to explore!

Or its low density could indicate that it is composed of water ice with only a small amount of rock and considerably porous. It’s very low density also seems to allow impacts to form deeper and sharper craters.

But unlike most of Saturn’s moons, Hyperion has a low albedo (.2 – .3) indicating that it is covered by at least a thin layer of dark material. Cassini data from 2007 indicates that this material is rich in organic molecules. Quite an interesting place, this Hyperion.

How did you do on this week’s challenge?

Original Source: APOD, Nine Planets

Posted on by Ian O'Neill

Could Dark Matter be the Root Cause of Flyby Anomalies?

The Galileo mission above Earth - the subsequent flybys caused an unexpected boost in velocity (credit: NASA)

When space probes Galileo, Rosetta, NEAR and Cassini carried out Earth flyby manoeuvre, scientists measured a bizarre and unpredictable jumps in orbital acceleration. To this day, the phenomenon remains unexplained, but there are many ideas as to how this flyby anomaly may be caused. As previously reported on the Universe Today, some of the scientific explanations can be pretty exotic (the Unruh Effect, after all, isn’t that easy to understand), but this new theory is just as captivating. In a new study from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, one researcher thinks dark matter might be messing around with our robotic explorers…

Dark matter is probably one of the most interesting, yet controversial, ideas in advanced cosmological studies. We have reported on many of the existing theories as to how we might be able to detect the Universe’s “missing matter” and it is thought that the bulk of universal mass may be held in a range of sub-atomic to massive stellar objects.

The flyby anomalies have been attributed to measurement error (spaceships using the Earth as a gravitational slingshot have their velocities measured by Doppler radar instruments on ground-based observatories), the Unruh effect, even variations in the speed of light, but so far, dark matter hasn’t really featured. So if there is dark matter out there in space, perhaps it will influence the spaceships we send out there. Now Stephen Adler at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton examines this possibility and imposes some limits that dark matter may influence flyby anomalies.

The biggest challenge facing any anomaly theory is that spacecraft have experienced increases and decreases in acceleration, what could be the chief suspect causing these sudden changes in acceleration? Alder points to the strange physics behind dark matter accumulating around the Earth, confined within a planetary ring, much like the visible rings around Saturn. What’s more, to explain flyby observations, the ring would have to contain at least two types of dark matter (non-baryonic particles). Interestingly, I recently wrote about the proposed LUX detector to be buried in a disused South Dakota goldmine. This detector will be the first of its kind to attempt to measure the elusive Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) that have been theorized to contain large quantities of matter, hence a large proportion of the dark matter in our universe. This leads to the possibility that the Earth may be passing through “clouds” of WIMPs, giving some credence to the idea that dark matter varieties may also be contained in the volume of space surrounding Earth. As spacecraft orbiting Earth passes through this dark matter ring, perhaps there will be some complex interaction causing this sudden change in acceleration.

For more technical information, have a read of the arXiv publication: “Can the flyby anomaly be attributed to earth-bound dark matter?” by Stephen L. Adler.

Source: arXiv blog

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Spaceship Sighting Alert

The next few evenings will provide excellent opportunities for observing the International Space Station in the night skies above both Europe and North America. Beginning this evening, May 21 through May 23 the ISS will pass over from two to four times per night, depending on your location. Because of the station’s current orientation and flight path, it will be highlighted almost constantly by sunlight as it flies over these continents, and thus visible to Earthlings below. If you’ve never had the opportunity to see the space station fly over your backyard, this is a great chance to do so, given your specific area is free from cloud cover. And for those of you that have seen the ISS before, you know what a spectacular (and sometimes spine-tingling) sight it is. It’s unusual to get such a clear view of the ISS across such a wide spectrum of countries. And how, you ask, can you find out when the station will be flying over your house?

There are a couple of different websites that provide real-time tracking data and information about the ISS sighting opportunities. NASA has a Quick and Easy Sightings by City site, where you just search for your country and city which provides local times and the location in the sky where the station will be visible.

The European Space Agency also provides their ISS: Where Is It Now site that also allows you to select your country and city to find the station’s location.

The Heaven’s Above website (which also powers ESA’s site) is also an excellent site to find out when the ISS, as well as all sorts of other satellites and other heavenly sights will be visible. At Heaven’s Above, you can plug in your exact latitude and longitude, so if you live in a remote area, you’ll be able to have exact times and locations to look for satellites instead of relying on information for the nearest city.

So take this great chance to see our orbiting outpost. If you have a strong enough and tracking-capable telescope you might even be able to spot specific modules on the station, or the solar arrays. The Astrospider site has some images and movies available of what this looks like.

And this is a great opportunity to inspire a child about the wonders of space exploration and astronomy.

For more information about the ISS.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Get Your Free Dione Atlas Here!

Every year my car insurance company provides a free road atlas that helps me get where I need to go. Now, the imaging team from the Cassini spacecraft is ensuring that future travelers will be able to find their way around Saturn’s icy moons by providing detailed atlases of the surface features of these remote satellites. The Cassini Imaging Team just released the third in a series of atlases, this one charting the fractured, 1,125 kilometer-wide Dione. To do this, they stitched together 449 high resolution images of the moon to produce a global map. These atlases are being released simultaneously to the public and the scientific community, available with just a click or two of your mouse. So, get your free atlases here!

The atlases can be found at the CICLOPS website (Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations.) And while you’re getting your free atlas, browse around for other amazing (and free) images of the Saturn system, such as this sensational image of Enceladus backdropped with Saturn’s rings:

The Cassini imaging team previously released atlases of the geologically active Enceladus and the obscure outer moon Phoebe. Atlases of other moons will be released as Cassini’s mission continues, with Iapetus and Tethys next in line.

For Dione, the atlas was produced at a scale of 1:1,000,000, where 1 inch on the map is one million inches, or almost 26 kilometers on the surface of the moon.

These maps will help planetary scientists study these worlds, serving as a basis for geologic interpretations, and help estimate the ages of surface regions, and aid in deciphering the processes that formed the moons’ landscapes. But most importantly, with their accurate calculation of latitude and longitude, these maps allow scientists to easily find, and refer to, features of interest on the moons’ surfaces.

While Cassini has not been able to image every portion of the surfaces of Saturn’s moons, the Imaging Team has been able to combine images from the Voyager mission to help fill in any voids in Cassini data.
Now that they atlases are being assembled, the next task for the Cassini scientists will be to name the features on the moons. This is usually done using names and locations from various mythologies from different cultures. Features from Dione will be named from Virgil’s “Aeneid.”

CICLOPS is located at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The lab’s director and Cassini imaging team leader, Carolyn Porco said, “Both robotic and human travelers to Saturn in the future will surely rely on this growing collection of maps and their derivatives to find their way among the moons of Saturn.”

Original news source: CICLOPS

Posted on by Ian O'Neill

Phytoplankton Bloom Erupts in the North Sea

Usually the North Sea conjures up cold and gloomy visions. But as the stunning image above shows, this isn’t always the case. ESA’s Envisat captured vast green swirls of phytoplankton bloom drifting in the North Sea currents on May 7th 2008; spring has most definitely sprung for the Scottish waters. But how is this bright green bloom produced? What has stirred up all this activity? It seems that for a short time, the lush green landscape of Fife is matched by the sea-faring plankton off the UK coast…

Phytoplankton through the microscope (NOAA)

This vivid green bloom was created by a type of plankton called phytoplankton. The microscopic plant floats near the surface of large bodies of water where sunlight is plentiful. Like any land-based plant, phytoplankton requires photosynthesis to survive. Other types of plankton include zooplankton (microscopic creatures) and bacterioplankton (water-borne bacteria) survive by feeding off other plankton varieties. The plant variety of plankton, phytoplankton, is well known to produce blooms when nutrients on the marine environment increase, boosting phytoplankton population. It would seem that the water off the Scotland coast has become particularly nutrient rich, with plenty of sunlight, creating magnificent displays observable from orbit.

Envisat above Earth (ESA)

This particular bloom was captured by the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument on board the ESA’s Envisat operating at a full spatial resolution of 300m (i.e. features of 300m can be resolved). The green hue is from the chlorophyll (essential for photosynthesis) contained within each phytoplankton cell. Depending on the phytoplankton species, it’s possible that there are hundreds to thousands of cells per millilitre of sea water.

Phytoplankton is very important when considering the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and their density in the worlds oceans are modelled in simulations of future climate change. During photosynthesis, they absorb carbon dioxide (and generate oxygen), so they form a highly influential carbon sink.

Source: ESA Picture of the Day

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

World’s Strangest Telescope – The IceCube

IceCube: Icetop Tank by Dan Hubert

Since the 1950s and the beginning of the “space race” scientists have wanted to practice astronomy and particle physics using high-energy neutrinos. So what’s stopping them? The challenge of building the kilometer-sized observatory they predict is needed to do the science. Enter IceCube, a revolutionary new design in neutrino detecting telescopes. Deep in the frozen wastelands at the South Pole, the world’s most extreme telescope will search for neutrinos from our Universe’s most violent astrophysical sources.

Those impossibly tiny particles known as neutrinos are produced by the decay of radioactive elements and elementary particles such as pions. Unlike photons or charged particles, neutrinos originate from deep within exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars and make their way throughout our Universe, eluding capture and study. Nothing stops a neutrino… Unless it crashes into an atom in ice.

When the rare neutrino collides with an atom in the ultra-transparent ice, it produces a muon that in turn radiates blue light. By observing this fluorescence, scientist can then detect the path of the muon and in turn the path of the neutrino. But, this kind of work really requires seeing in the dark – total dark. By using the Earth as a type of telescope optical tube assembly, neutrinos can enter into the North Pole just as photons enter into a primary objective lens. When they interact with the pure, uncontaminated ice at Earth’s South Pole it’s a whole lot like reaching a telescope’s secondary optic. The Earth itself, like an optical tube, keeps stray photons aways and the fluorescence produced with the muon can then be collected and studied.

So what’s all the fuss about neutrinos? Say Project IceCube: “The basic motivation is to understand our Universe, specifically what powers the most energetic engines in the cosmos and fuels the bombardment of cosmic rays to the Earth. We also want to understand the nature of Dark Matter. At the end, the stuff from which we are made is only 4% of the Universe’s inventory, whereas Dark Matter is 23%. These are motivations dominantly driven by curiosity, by the dream of mankind to understand our origins, our place in the cosmos, and a far future much beyond our human horizons.”

In short, IceCube is one cool telescope!

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. OPP-9980474 (AMANDA) and OPP-0236449 (IceCube), University of Wisconsin-Madison. Photo by Daan Hubert/NSF

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

What Would You Say to ET?

This past semester at the University of Wyoming, students have been figuring out what humans, if they ever had the chance, should say to an extraterrestrial civilization. Professor Jeff Lockwood’s Interstellar Message Composition class is a creative writing class using the premise of interstellar communication to spur student’s imaginations about the current human condition, as well as the future. Funded in part by the NASA’s Wyoming Space Grant Consortium, the students compiled five questions they deemed as most important to ask another species. But this isn’t the first time communication with an alien species has been used to inspire students to think beyond themselves and their individual small worlds.

With a small group of people from the Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN area, I worked on a project from 1988-1994 called the World Timecapsule which prompted students to think about what they would convey to a distant civilization about humanity — the good, the bad, the wondrous, the beautiful and not-so-beautiful things about our world, our lives, and our history — in correlation to particular subjects they were studying in school. The World Timecapsule gathered submissions from over 5,000 students in five states before becoming part of SpaceArc, another similar educational program that ultimately launched student and public submissions on board a geosynchronous satellite in 1994. SpaceArc will orbit our planet for generations, where a passing alien ship might find it, or perhaps Earthlings could retrieve the satellite sometime in the future if we ever need to remember who we were back in the 1990’s.

Humans have always dreamed about communicating with extraterrestrials. This dream has prompted us to send radio signals out to space, to listen for those type of signals that another civilization might be sending, and to launch spacecraft to the outer reaches of the solar system along with information about ourselves – from music to personal greetings to images and representations of ourselves.

While the chances of talking with or actually meeting up with another species is considered infinitesimal, we still dream about it and hope that one day it will be possible.

The students in Wyoming came up with five questions for an interplanetary visitor:

If you have fear, what do you fear?
What is the ultimate purpose of your species’ life?
How can we extend the longevity of our civilization?
What makes you and your kind happy?
What should we know?

Not only did students compile these questions, but they had to answer them as well.

Professor Lockwood said in a Christian Science Monitor article that even the idea of communication with another civilization kept his class engaged, and even if his students’ work is never heard or understood by the intended recipients, they still learned something about the fundamental difficulties of interpersonal communication.

So, how would you answer the five questions posed by the students? And, revisiting my work with the World Timecapsule, here’s a chance for you to share what you would say to another civilization if you had the chance. Post your sincere sentiments below.

Original News Source: Christian Science Monitor