NASA's Spirit Mars rover recently observed the Martian moon Phobos pass through Mars' shadow. When this event happens here on Earth, it's called a lunar eclipse, as the Moon darkens and then brightens again as it passes through our shadow. This "Phobal eclipse" lasted about 26 minutes, but Spirit was only able to capture images from the first 15 minutes.
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This is the best photograph ever taken of Saturn's F ring shepherd moon Pandora, taken by the spacecraft on September 5, 2005. This tiny moon is only 84 kilometers (52 miles) across, and covered in grooves and small ridges. This indicates that it's probably coated in dust-sized material, which then fractures in places. Cassini was 52,000 kilometers (32,000 miles) from Pandora when it took this picture.
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ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory has discovered a new class of X-ray fast transient binary stars, which had gone undiscovered in previous observations. This new class of double stars systems always has a bright supergiant star with some kind of compact companion - like a black hole, neutron star or pulsar. It gives off energetic busts of X-rays which flare up quickly and then fade away. It's possible that the compact companion tangles up the supergiant's powerful solar wind with its gravity, and then feeds on it in bits and pieces.
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This unique photograph, taken by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, contains not one, but two supernova remnants. The pair are known as DEM L316, and they're located in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy. The gas shell at the upper-left contains considerably much more iron, so it's probably the product of a Type 1a, triggered by the infall of matter from a companion star onto a white dwarf. The lower-right shell is a Type II supernova, the remains of a massive star that exploded a few million years into its short life.
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In this face-on view of Saturn's rings, the darker Cassini Division is clearly visible. On the left is Saturn's massive B ring, which is has its edge maintained by Mimas, one of its moons. This photograph was taken on May 18, 2005, when Cassini was approximately 1.6 million km (1 million miles) from Saturn.
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NASA has announced that its Ames Research Center will manage the agency's new Robotic Lunar Exploration Program. Before humans set foot on the Moon again, a fleet of robots will map the lunar surface in tremendous detail. NASA Ames has already sent robots to the Moon; most recently the Lunar Prospector, which was launched on January 6, 1998. The spacecraft orbited the Moon, and found evidence of water ice at its poles.
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Star-forming region NGC 1333 is located 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Perseus, and is normally enshrouded by thick dust. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope used its infrared capabilities to pierce this dust layer to reveal the young stars hidden inside. Astronomers are hoping to use Spitzer to spot any nascent planetary structures around these young stars. Now that they're getting going, the young stars are firing out jets of radiation that are steadily clearing the surrounding region of additional dust.
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Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! With plenty of Moon and Mars to go around this week, let's see what else we can find as we begin by honoring the Southern Hemisphere and 47 Tucanae. We'll explore in Cassiopeia, watch for the Leonid meteor shower, capture double stars and look at both northern - and southern - spiral galaxies. So keep your eye on the sky...
Because here's what's up!
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One of the most iconic images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is of the Eagle Nebula, aka the "Pillars of Creation". NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has taken a similar photograph of a region in the Cassiopeia constellation called W5. This region is dominated by a single massive star blowing powerful solar winds. The surrounding dust and material has been cleared, and compacted into the pillars - these contain clusters of newborn stars.
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Venus is our nearest planetary neighbour. Compared to the Earth, it's nearly identical in size and distance from the Sun. But that's where the similarities end. While we enjoy our comfortable temperature, pressure and atmosphere, Venus' environment is downright hostile to life. The European Space Agency's Venus Express blasted off for our "evil twin" planet today, and will hope to help answer the question: what went wrong? My guest today is Larry Esposito from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado. He's a member of the Venus Express science team.
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One of the many hassles of returning humans to the Moon will be the lunar dust. This tiny, gritty, static-loving dust will get into everything, jamming seals, wearing down equipment, and generally causing astronauts endless headaches. Larry Taylor from the University of Tennessee is proposing that astronauts use a heated "lawn mower" to melt the surface of the Moon around their base camp to fuse the dust into larger pieces which won't be so destructive. Lunar dust will melt down with surprisingly little energy because it contains microscopic beads of pure iron which can fuse the grains together.
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In this amazing image taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, you can see three of Saturn's moons. Dione is on the left, and it's possible to see a large impact crater on the bottom right. Tethys is in the middle, and tiny Pandora is visible against the rings. Cassini took this image on September 22, 2005 when it was 1.2 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Saturn.
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An international team of researchers have developed a new computer model that simulated Jupiter's incredible weather systems. Jupiter's weather is much different from the Earth's, as the strong winds continuously circle the planet, changing very little over time. The massive East-West winds in Jupiter's equatorial region can reach speeds of 550 kph (340 mph). The simulation predicts that the planet's hot interior powers these winds, and explains why they can stay so stable for centuries.
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This Hubble Space Telescope photograph shows NGC 346, a star forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The radiation pouring out of the young hot star at the heart of the nebula is pushing out the surrounding gas and dust creating the beautiful shapes in the image. The small dark globules of material point back at the star like windsocks. NGC 346 can be resolved into at least three different sub-clusters of material each of which contains several more hot, blue, high-mass stars.
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"Aruba, Jamaica oh I want to take you, Bermuda, Bahamas, come on pretty mamma, that's where you want to go to get away from it all", or do you? What about the edge of space, low earth orbit or Mare Tranquillitatis? They don't rhyme as well, but the company Space Adventures can take you there or get you as close as any private company can make possible. To show their stuff, Eric Anderson, the president of Space Adventures, together with Joshua Piven, have written,
The Space Tourist's Handbook. In it, they help you decide which space vacation to choose and how to make the best of your special time. So really get away from it all, skip the run-of-the-mill, and read about trying some truly out-of-this-world stuff.
ESA's Venus Express lifted off today atop a Russian Soyuz-Fregat rocket, beginning its journey to Venus. ESA's Space Operations Centre (ESOC) at Darmstadt, Germany made contact with the spacecraft two hours after liftoff, and reported that it has oriented itself correctly and deployed its solar arrays. Its onboard systems are working properly, and its low gain antenna is communicating back to Earth - the high-gain antenna will be deployed in three days. If all goes well, Venus Express will arrive at our closest planetary neighbour in April 2006 and begin orbiting maneuvers.
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Scientists have found that hardy bacteria can survive a trip into space, and now the list of natural astronauts includes lichen. During a recent experiment by ESA, lichen astronauts were placed on board the Foton-M2 rocket and launched into space where they were exposed to vacuum, extreme temperatures and ultraviolet radiation for 14.6 days. Upon analysis, it appears that the lichens handled their spaceflight just fine, in fact, they're so hardy, it's possible they could survive on the surface of Mars.
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Astronomers have discovered a massive star moving extremely quickly through the outer halo of the Milky Way, and into intergalactic space. The star, named HE 0437-5439, was discovered as part of the Hamburg/ESO sky survey, and was clocked traveling at 723 km/s, or 2.6 million kilometres per hour (1.6 million miles an hour). It's possible that the star was accelerated when it came too close to a supermassive black hole in the centre of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
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This Cassini photograph shows Saturn's moon Dione, passing just underneath the planet's wispy F ring. If you look carefully, you can actually see several strands of the ring. This picture was taken on September 20, 2005, when Cassini was approximately 2 million km (1.2 million miles) from Dione.
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After yesterday's launch delay, a Zenit-3SL rocket blasted off from Sea Launch's Odyssey Launch Platform carrying the Inmarsat-4 satellite into orbit. Inmarsat-4, one of the heaviest communications satellites ever launched, will provide high-speed mobile communications to customers in the Americas. Early data indicates that the satellite is in excellent condition.
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Expedition 12 Flight Engineer Valery Tokarev and Commander Bill McArthur spent over 5 hours outside the International Space Station, performing their first spacewalk. During their time in space, the two men installed a new video camera on the P1 truss structure and jettisoned a probe attached to the exterior of the station. The mission started an hour later than planned because of a misaligned valve in the Quest airlock that needed troubleshooting.
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Cassini snapped this picture of Titan on September 24, 2005, before its recent flyby. If you look carefully, you can see a thin haze hanging just above the surface of Titan's surface. This is part of Titan's atmosphere, visible at an altitude of 500 km (310 miles) above the surface of the moon. The particles in this part of the atmosphere are the exact size that scatters the ultraviolet light that reaches Cassini's cameras, which is why we can see it.
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Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! "It is a most beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon." Take Galileo's words to heart and be sure to let Venus and Mars capture the eye this week. Come, now. Let's explore and observe some of the finest moments in astronomy history as we ask for the Moon...
But keep reaching for the stars.
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The history of our universe encompasses all. Our existence and the existence of every other atom can be traced back to an earlier time. One strong postulation envisions a moment when time and space all came together at which moment there was a Big Bang. Since then, actions and relationships have dictated development until we arrive at where we see ourselves on Earth today. Joseph Silk in his book
On the Shores of the Unknown manages to include physical explanations for many of the astronomical highlights of this process. In so doing, he's made a very readable history of our universe.
After 5 years afloat, the gigantic B-15A iceberg has broken up off the coast of Antarctica's Cape Adare. This image of the iceberg was taken using ESA's Envisat satellite Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR). The bottle-shaped iceberg had run aground, and probably flexed and strained until it broke up into 9 pieces along fault lines on October 27. The largest pieces have been named B-15M, B-15N and B-15P.
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Cassini's latest flyby of Titan on October 28, 2005 took it directly over Huygen's landing site, allowing scientists to match up images from the two spacecraft. This mosaic was created from 10 images taken by Cassini as it swept past Titan. The view gives a resolution of 1 km (0.6 miles) per pixel, and has been labeled with names that imaging scientists have been devising.
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The launch of Inmarsat-4 F2 from the floating Sea Launch platform has been pushed back a day because a software glitch halted its countdown. Flight controllers say they've resolved the problem, and the countdown should progress smoothly now. Once launched, the Inmarsat-4 F2 will be one of the largest and most powerful communications satellites ever deployed, providing coverage for most of the Americas and into the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
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The European Southern Observatory has released a beautiful high resolution image of Robert's Quartet; a group of 4 very different galaxies located about 160 million light-years from Earth. Its member galaxies are NGC 87, NGC 88, NGC 89 and NGC 92. Robert's Quartet is one of the best examples of a compact group of galaxies, which can contain anywhere from 4 to 8 galaxies, and interact with each other from time to time. One galaxy in the group, NGC 87, has large regions of furious star formation because of its interactions with its neighbours.
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The European Space Agency's upcoming Venus Express mission to our planet's "evil twin" should reveal a planet of extremes, and more than a few surprises. One question revolves around the identity of a mysterious "unknown ultraviolet absorber", which seems to limit the amount of sunlight that reaches the planet's surface. Scientists are also hoping to find out if the planet still has active volcanoes. Venus Express is due to lift off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on November 9th and arrive at Venus in April 2006.
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After gathering data on Greenland for more than a decade, ESA scientists have reported that the island's ice sheet is actually growing at its interior. Data collection began in 1991 with the radar altimeter instrument on board ESA's ERS-1, followed by ERS-2, and most recently Envisat, which has 10 instruments to measure various properties of the Earth from orbit. Greenland's ice sheet seems to be thickening at a rate of 6.4 cm (2.6 inches) a year above altitudes of 1,500 metres (5000 feet). Below that altitude, the ice sheets are decreasing in thickness.
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Cassini snapped this photograph of Saturn's moons Tethys and Dione separated by Saturn's rings seen nearly edgewise. Even though they're roughly the same size, it's easy to see they have much different surfaces, indicating different evolutionary histories. Cassini took this image on September 12, 2005 when it was 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Saturn.
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The Hubble Space Telescope snapped this high resolution image of Mars on October 28, 2005; one day before the Red Planet made its closest approach to Earth. Clearly visible near the middle of the planet is a large dust storm that has been growing and evolving over the last few weeks. This dust storm measures about 1,500 km (930 miles) across, and is actually visible in many amateur telescopes. Some of the smallest craters visible in this image are approximately 20 km (12 miles) across.
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Have you seen some really bright meteors in the sky? You might have been lucky enough to see a fireball from the Taurid meteor shower. Every year in late October, early November, the Earth slams into the dust trail left behind Comet Encke. The tiny grains strike our atmosphere traveling at 105,000 kph (65,000 mph) and explode, leaving a bright trail that we see in the sky. 2005 could be a very special year for the Taurid meteor shower, which is due to peak between November 5th and November 12th.
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We only see material in the Universe when it's hot enough to glow, like stars, hot clouds of gas or galaxies. The material which isn't glowing is practically invisible. But astronomers from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have developed a method to detect the reflected starlight bouncing off of normally dark clouds of material. This "cloudshine" allows astronomers to see the shape of a cloud forming nebula in tremendous detail.
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Astronomers have used the National Science Foundation's continent-wide Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), to peer deeper into the heart of the Milky Way than ever before. This image brings astronomers tantalizingly close the supermassive black hole believed to lurk there called Sagittarius A*. The strong pull of this black hole should create a distinctive shadow on the surrounding material, which should be visible if astronomers can double the sensitivity of this instrument.
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope might have captured images of the first stars in the Universe, glimpsing an era more than 13 billion years ago; a time when the glow of the Big Bang faded. A 10-hour observation by Spitzer's infrared camera array in the constellation Draco captured a diffuse glow of infrared light. It's believed this glow is coming from the first stars, more than a hundred times more massive than our Sun, which survived for only a few million years before exploding as the first supernovae.
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Researchers have discovered methane-producing microbes in some of the most inhospitable deserts here in Earth, bolstering the theory that methane detected in the Martian atmosphere was caused by life. The scientists collected soil samples near the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert. They added a growth medium to the soil, and detected methane gas being released. This isn't conclusive evidence of life on Mars, but it helps make the case that microbial life can and might exist on the Martian surface.
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Astronomers were expecting that a massive star in the Westerlund 1 star cluster should have collapsed into a black hole. Instead, it became a neutron star. Since this star was 40 times the mass of the Sun before it collapsed, it should have been a prime black hole candidate. So why did it end up as a neutron star? It's possible that the star blew off most of its mass at the end of its life, so there just wasn't enough material to form a black hole.
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When Mars Express' Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) malfunctioned a few months ago, mission controllers weren't sure they could get it working again. Well, they were wrong. It turns out that the pendulum motor, which drives various parts of the PFS had failed, and they were able to recover by using a back-up motor. PFS is a very sensitive instrument capable of detecting minute traces of various gasses in the Martian atmosphere, including methane which could indicate current life on the Red Planet.
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During Cassini's recent Titan flyby on October 28, 2005, it imaged the area where Huygens landed earlier this year. Of course it couldn't see the probe, but scientists were able to match up Cassini's images to Huygen's images to show exactly where it landed. The colour image is was actually taken in infrared (red areas are brighter and blue is darker, and the the black-and-white image was produced by Cassini's synthetic aperture radar.
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Eta Carinae is one of the most massive and unusual stars in the Milky Way, and now NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer satellite has detected a hot companion. This mysterious star, which scientists think is in the final stages of life, is located 7,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Carina. Its companion star completes an orbit every 5.5 years, and FUSE was able to detect when it passed behind Eta Carinae, briefly dimming the amount of high-end ultraviolet radiation coming from the pair.
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Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have developed a detailed model of the Earth's climate over the next few centuries to answer the question... what if we burned all the fossil fuels by the year 2300. The answer, of course, isn't a pretty picture. In their model, global temperatures will rise 8-degrees Celsius (14.5 F), and melting polar caps will raise the oceans 7 metres (23 feet). The damage would be even worse in the polar regions, which could grow by 20-degrees C (68 F).
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This photograph of Saturn's moon Dione was taken by Cassini on Sept. 20, 2005 from a distance of 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles). The image shows the many canyons that crisscross the surface of the 1,126-kilometer (700-mile) moon, as well as its bright southern pole.
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Time to revise your idea of Pluto. New images gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed that this distant planet could two additional moons. If this is true, Pluto will be the first Kuiper Belt Object found to have multiple moons. The candidate moons have been provisionally named S/2005 P1 and S/2005 P2, and are approximately 44,000 km (27,000 miles) away from Pluto.
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Is science fiction an arena where fantasies run wild or an experimental lab where new technologies, cultures and even physics can be assessed? Afficionados of this genre more likely think the latter. But not long ago, science fiction stories and even rocketry were considered little more than a fool's occupation. One person bucked this trend. He is Jack Parsons and he is also the central figure in George Pendle's biography entitled
Strange Angel. From this we read how Parsons made believers of many people who ridiculed science and space travel.
Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! We begin the week on the eve of All Hallows as we learn the significance the Pleiades. Come... Join in the fun as we as the night steals our souls and gives us X-ray eyes. We'll search for glowing bones, watch fireballs, look into the eyes of a "Demon", brave a supernovae and stare down the "God of War". Go outside under the stars, if you dare. Because...
Here's what's up!
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