Space and astronomy news
Seekers need to know everything about their quarries. Their appearance, lifestyle and mannerisms all provide clues as to their whereabouts. Fishermen know the haunts, the lures and the time of day that give the best chance of success. Comet hunters are an equally avid group of seekers and some would say that their quarry is …
Learning the night sky is pretty intimidating. With enough desire and perseverance it’s achievable, even though thousands of individual stars glitter away. Trying to install that desire and knowledge into the younger crowd is even tougher. Anton Vamplew with his book Simple Stargazing provides a significant aid for just this. With a knack for detail …
Fighting the good fight. David meeting Goliath. Persevering against the odds. These phrases give images associated with a valiant struggle to succeed. William T. Vollmann in his book Uncentering the Earth shares his thoughts on the struggles of Nicholas Copernicus in relocating the Sun to the centre of the solar system. Though Copernicus did not …
The first astronauts wanted to be more than passengers in their spaceships. However, undertaking an active role meant that systems, interfaces and controls need be suited for human use even though the environment was completely unknown. Mary Jane Chambers and Dr. Randall Chambers in their book Getting Off the Planet provide a first hand account of some of the challenges that were mastered in resolving this issue and in meshing human to machine. As they note, with judicious testing and training, there was much greater confidence in the success of all the space missions.
Greetings fellow SkyWatchers! The week begins as we have a look into the “Fishmouth” – M43. Then it’s time to get Sirius as we learn how and when to look for a white dwarf star. As the Moon returns, we’ll have a look at its features as well as some bright sky objects. So keep an eye on the sky, because…
Here’s what’s up!
Astronomers have found evidence of monstrous black holes at the heart of galaxies with the mass of millions of stars, or ones with just the mass of a single star. But not much in between (100 to 10,000 stellar masses). One of the newest pieces of evidence for a medium-sized black hole was captured by NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory. It measured the orbit of a star trapped in a death spiral around one of these medium-mass black holes.
The Mars Exploration Rovers have unquestionably been one of NASA’s most exciting and successful missions to date. The projects scientific principal investigator, Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University has written a candid and fascinating new book about the mission. Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet offers an inside look at the journeys the rovers have taken; not only their captivating treks across Mars, but the surprisingly circuitous and difficult route they took from inception to development and launch.
New observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal have disrupted theories that massive galaxies didn’t evolve early in the Universe. Astronomers have found four remote galaxies, which are several times larger than our own Milky Way, which probably formed when the Universe was only 2 billion years old. Astronomers previously believed that the largest galaxies only came together very recently, after billions of years of mergers into larger and larger structures.
The closest asteroid ever recorded to pass by the Earth was discovered on Monday evening by NASA’s LINEAR asteroid survey. Asteroid 2004 FH, which is only 30 metres across, will fly past the Earth at a distance of only 43,000 km – well within the orbit of the Moon. Objects of this size are believed to pass the Earth once every two years or so, but they’re usually undetected. 2004 FH will make its closest approach at 2208 UTC (5:08 pm EST), and should be visible to areas of Europe and Asia with binoculars.
Sojourner is the little robot that enthralled Earth in 1997. For the first time, a mobile construct of humans was being guided by humans on the surface of another planet. Andrew Mishkin is a systems engineer who worked on the Sojourner project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) during the inception, birth, and life of this little rover. He uses his notes, official documentation, unofficial recollections and friendships to present Sojourner, An Insider’s View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission – a book that is an historical reference, a guide to systems engineering, and an insight into the bureaucracy of government science departments.