Space and astronomy news
Time for your daily dose of awesomeness from the ISS! Here’s a time-lapse video of the Aurora Australis photographed by Expedition 30 crew members on March 4, as the Station passed 240 miles (386 km) over the chilly waves of the southern Indian Ocean. Absolutely gorgeous!
Continue reading “Sky Candy: Southern Lights Over The Indian Ocean”
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The first student selected photos of the Moon’s surface snapped by NASA’s new pair of student named Lunar Mapping orbiters – Ebb & Flow – have just been beamed back and show an eerie view looking back to the Home Planet – and all of Humanity – barely rising above the pockmarked terrain of the mysterious far side of our nearest neighbor in space.
Congratulations to Americas’ Youth on an outstanding and inspiring choice !!
The student photo is reminiscent of one of the iconic images of Space Exploration – the first full view of the Earth from the Moon taken by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1 back in August 1966 (see below).
The images were taken in the past few days by the MoonKAM camera system aboard NASA’s twin GRAIL spacecraft currently circling overhead in polar lunar orbit, and previously known as GRAIL A and B. The formation-flying probes are soaring over the Moon’s north and south poles.
The nearly identical ships were rechristened as Ebb and Flow after Fourth grade students from the Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Bozeman, Mont., won the honor to rename both spacecraft by submitting the winning entries in a nationwide essay competition sponsored by NASA.
“The Bozeman 4th graders had the opportunity to target the first images soon after our science operations began,” said Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., to Universe Today.
“It is impossible to overstate how thrilled and excited we are !”
The initial packet of some 66 student-requested digital images from the Bozeman kids were taken by the Ebb spacecraft from March 15-17 and downlinked to Earth March 20. They sure have lots of exciting classwork ahead analyzing all those lunar features !
“GRAIL’s science mapping phase officially began on March 6 and we are collecting science data,” Zuber stated.
GRAIL’s science goal is to map our Moon’s gravity field to the highest precision ever. This will help deduce the deep interior composition, formation and evolution of the Moon and other rocky bodies such as Earth and also determine the nature of the Moon’s hidden core.
Engaging students and the public in science and space exploration plays a premier role in the GRAIL project. GRAIL is NASA’s first planetary mission to carry instruments – in the form of cameras – fully dedicated to education and public outreach.
Over 2,700 schools in 52 countries have signed up to participate in MoonKAM.
5th to 8th grade students can send suggestions for lunar surface targets to the GRAIL MoonKAM Mission Operations Center at UC San Diego, Calif. Students will use the images to study lunar features such as craters, highlands, and maria while also learning about future landing sites.
NASA calls MoonKAM – “The Universe’s First Student-Run Planetary Camera”. MoonKAM means Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students.
The MoonKAM project is managed by Dr Sally Ride, America’s first female astronaut.
“What might seem like just a cool activity for these kids may very well have a profound impact on their futures,” Ride said in a NASA statement. “The students really are excited about MoonKAM, and that translates into an excitement about science and engineering.”
“MoonKAM is based on the premise that if your average picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture from lunar orbit may be worth a classroom full of engineering and science degrees,” says Zuber. “Through MoonKAM, we have an opportunity to reach out to the next generation of scientists and engineers. It is great to see things off to such a positive start.”
Altogether there are eight MoonKAM cameras aboard Ebb and Flow – one 50 mm lens and three 6 mm lenses. Each probe is the size of a washing machine and measures just over 3 feet in diameter and height.
Snapping the first images was delayed a few days by the recent series of powerful solar storms.
“Due to the extraordinary intensity of the storms we took the precaution of turning off the MoonKAMs until the solar flux dissipates a bit,” Zuber told me.
“GRAIL weathered the storm well. The spacecraft and instrument are healthy and we are continuing to collect science data.”
The washing-machine sized probes have been flying in tandem around the Moon since entering lunar orbit in back to back maneuvers over the New Year’s weekend. Engineers spent the past two months navigating the spaceship duo into lower, near-polar and near-circular orbits with an average altitude of 34 miles (55 kilometers) that are optimized for science data collection and simultaneously checking out the spacecraft systems.
Ebb and Flow were launched to the Moon on September 10, 2011 aboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida and took a circuitous 3.5 month low energy path to the moon to minimize the overall costs.
The Apollo astronauts reached the Moon in just 3 days. NASA’s next generation Orion space capsule currently under development will send American astronauts back to lunar orbit by 2021 or sooner.
NASA has just granted an extension to the GRAIL mission. Watch for my follow-up report detailing the expanded science goals of GRAIL’s extended lunar journey.
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March 24 (Sat): Free Lecture by Ken Kremer at the New Jersey Astronomical Association, Voorhees State Park, NJ at 830 PM. Topic: Atlantis, the End of Americas Shuttle Program, Orion, SpaceX, CST-100, Moon and the Future of NASA Human & Robotic Spaceflight
Pretty impressive, I’d say!
This video is a compilation of different time-lapses taken from the ISS over the past several months, edited by Alex Rivest and shared on Vimeo. It shows just how incredible the stars can appear from the night side of our planet… and 240 miles up!
Drown yourself in stunning images from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center set to awesome music from indie band One Ring Zero. Don’t hold back, just dive right in. You’ll love it, we promise.
Via Geeked on Goddard.
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Here’s a gorgeous view from the International Space Station, taken by the Expedition 30 crew on Feb. 4, 2012 as the station passed into orbital dawn. The greens and reds of the aurora borealis shimmer above Earth’s limb beyond the Station’s solar panels as city lights shine beneath a layer of clouds.
As the ISS travels around the planet at 17,500 mph (28,163 km/h) it moves in and out of daylight, in effect experiencing dawn 16 times every day.
From that vantage point, 240 miles (386 km) above the Earth, the lights of the aurora — both northern and southern — appear below, rather than above.
See this and more images from the Space Station’s nightly flights here.
Also, here’s a time-lapse video made from photos taken by the Expedition 30 crew a few days earlier. Enjoy!
(Video courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center.)
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28 years ago today, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless left the relative safety of Challenger’s payload bay and went untethered into orbit around Earth, venturing farther than anyone ever before.
The historic photo above was taken when McCandless was 320 feet from the orbiter — about the length of an American football field, or just shy of the width of the International Space Station.
The free-flying endeavor was possible because of McCandless’ nitrogen-powered jet-propelled backpack, called a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU). It attached to the space suit’s life-support system and was operated by hand controls, allowing untethered access to otherwise inaccessible areas of the orbiter and was also used in the deployment, service and retrieval of satellites.
The MMU used a non-contaminating nitrogen propellant that could be recharged in the orbiter. It weighed 140 kg (308 lbs) and has a built-in 35mm camera.
After the Challenger disaster, the MMU was deemed too risky and was discontinued. But for a brief period of time in the early ’80s, humans had the means for really “soaring to new heights”.
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A new computer simulation is showing Earth’s magnetosphere in amazing detail – and it looks a lot like a huge pile of tangled spaghetti (with the Earth as a meatball). Or perhaps a cosmic version of modern art.
The magnetosphere is formed by the Sun’s magnetic field interacting with Earth’s own magnetic field. When charged particles from a solar storm, also known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), impact our magnetic field, the results can be spectacular, from powerful electrical currents in the atmosphere to beautiful aurorae at high altitudes. Space physicists are using the new simulations to better understand the nature of our magnetosphere and what happens when it becomes extremely tangled.
Using a Cray XT5 Jaguar supercomputer, the physicists can better predict the effects of space weather, such as solar storms, before they actually hit our planet. According to Homa Karimabadi, a space physicist at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD), “When a storm goes off on the sun, we can’t really predict the extent of damage that it will cause here on Earth. It is critical that we develop this predictive capability.” He adds: “With petascale computing we can now perform 3D global particle simulations of the magnetosphere that treat the ions as particles, but the electrons are kept as a fluid. It is now possible to address these problems at a resolution that was well out of reach until recently.”
It helps that the radiation from solar storms can take 1-5 days to reach Earth, providing some lead time to assess the impact and any potential damage.
The previous studies were done using the Cray XT5 system known as Kraken; with the new Cray XT5 Jaguar supercomputer, they can perform simulations three times as large. The earlier simulations contained a “resolution” of about 1 billion individual particles, while the new ones contain about 3.2 trillion, a major improvement.
So next time you are eating that big plate of spaghetti, look up – the universe has its own recipes as well.
The original press release from Oak Ridge National Laboratory is here.
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When you’re cruising along in low-Earth orbit, running out of supplies is not an option. Fortunately there are Progress vehicles: Russian spacecraft that carry much-needed supplies and equipment to the astronauts aboard the Space Station.
The photo above, taken by Expedition 30 crew members, shows the unmanned Progress 46 vehicle approaching the ISS on January 27, 2012.
Progress 46 carried 2,050 pounds of propellant, 110 pounds oxygen and air, 926 pounds of water and 2,778 pounds of parts and experiment hardware, for a total of 2.9 tons of food, fuel and equipment for the Expedition 30 crew.
The Progress is similar in appearance and design to Soyuz spacecraft, which serve as human transportation to and from the Space Station, but differs in that the second of the spacecraft’s three sections (as prior to launch) is a refueling module, and the third uppermost section is a cargo module.
In addition to bringing supplies to the ISS, Progress vehicles also serve as – for lack of a better term – “garbage trucks”, undocking from the Station loaded with trash and re-entering the atmosphere, during which time much of the refuse inside gets incinerated.
Progress 46 successfully docked to the Space Station at 7:09 p.m. (EST) on Jan. 27, 2012.
Image: NASA
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According to conventional thinking, plant life first took hold on Earth after oceans and rivers formed; the soil produced by liquid water breaking down bare rock provided an ideal medium for plants to grow in. It certainly sounds logical, but a new study is challenging that view – the theory is that vascular plants, those containing a transport system for water and nutrients, actually created a cycle of glaciation and melting, conditions which led to the formation of rivers and mud which allowed forests and farmland to later develop. In short, they helped actually create the landscapes we see today.
The evidence was just published in two articles in a special edition of Nature Geoscience.
In the first article, analysis of the data proposes that vascular plants began to absorb the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere about 450 million years ago. This led to a cooling of temperatures on a global scale, resulting in widespread glaciation. As the glaciers later started to melt, they ground up the Earth’s surface, forming the kind of soils we see today.
The second article goes further, stating that today’s rivers were also created by vascular plants – the vegetation broke the rocks down into mud and minerals and then also held the mud in place. This caused river banks to start forming, acting as channels for water, which up until then had tended to flow over the surface much more randomly. As the water was channeled into more specific routes, rivers formed. This led to periodic flooding; sediments were deposited over large areas which created rich soil. As trees were able to take root in this new soil, debris from the trees fell into the rivers, creating logjams. This had the effect of creating new rivers and causing more flooding. These larger fertile areas were then able to support the growth of larger lush forests and farmland.
According to Martin Gibling, a professor of Earth science at Dalhousie University, “Sedimentary rocks, before plants, contained almost no mud. But after plants developed, the mud content increased dramatically. Muddy landscapes expanded greatly. A new kind of eco-space was created that wasn’t there before.”
The new theory also leads to the possibility that any exoplanets that happen to have vegetation would look different from Earth; varying circumstances would create a surface unique to each world. Any truly Earth-like exoplanets might be very similar in general, but the way that their surfaces have been modified might be rather different.
It’s an interesting scenario, but it also raises other questions. What about the ancient river channels on Mars? Some appear to have been formed by brief catastrophic floods, but others seem more similar to long-lived rivers here on Earth, especially if there actually was a northern hemisphere ocean as well. How did they form? Does this mean that rivers could form in a variety of ways, with or without plant life being involved? Could Mars have once had something equivalent to vascular plant life as well? Or could the new theory just be wrong? Then there’s Titan, which has numerous rivers still flowing today. Albeit they are liquid methane/ethane instead of water, but what exactly led to their formation?
From the editorial in Nature Geoscience:
Without the workings of life, the Earth would not be the planet it is today. Even if there are a number of planets that could support tectonics, running water and the chemical cycles that are essential for life as we know it, it seems unlikely that any of them would look like Earth. Even if evolution follows a predictable path, filling all available niches in a reproducible and consistent way, the niches on any Earth analogue could be different if the composition of its surface and atmosphere are not identical to those of Earth. And if evolution is random, the differences would be expected to be even larger. Either way, a glimpse of the surface of an exoplanet — if we ever get one — may give us a whole new perspective on biogeochemical cycling and geomorphology.
Just as the many exoplanets now being found are of a previously unknown and amazingly wide variety, and all uniquely alien, even the ones that (may) support life are likely to be just as diverse from each other as they are from Earth itself. Earth’s “twin” may be out there, but in terms of outward appearance, it may be somewhat more of a fraternal twin than an exact replica.
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An international plan is unfolding that will launch satellites into orbit to study global snowfall precipitation with unprecedented detail. With the upcoming Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellites, for the first time we will know when, where and how much snow falls on Earth, allowing greater understanding of energy cycles and how best to predict extreme weather.
Snow is more than just a pretty winter decoration… it’s also a very important contributor to fresh water supply in many regions around the world, especially those areas that rely on spring runoff from mountains.
The snowmelt from the Sierra Nevadas, for example, accounts for a third of the water supply for California.
But changing climate and recent drought conditions have affected how much snow the mountains receive in winter… and thus how much water is released in the spring. Unfortunately, as of now there’s no reliable way to comprehensively detect and measure falling snow from space… whether in the Sierras or the Andes or the Alps.
The GPM Core satellite, slated to launch in 2014, will change that.
“The GPM Core, with its ability to detect falling snows, it’s one of the very first times that we’ve put sensors in space to specifically look at falling snow,” said GPM Deputy Project Scientist Gail Skofronick-Jackson in an online video. “We’re at that edge where rain was fifty years ago. We’re still figuring out how to measure snow.”
And why is snow such a difficult subject to study?
“Rain tends to be spherical like drops,” says Skofronick-Jackson. “But if you’ve ever been out in a snowfall and you’ve looked at your shirt, you see the snow comes in all different forms.”
Once GPM scientists calculate all the various types of snowflake shapes, the satellite will be able to detect them from orbit.
“The GPM Core, with its additional frequencies and information on the sensors, is going to be able to provide us for the first time a lot more information about falling snow than we’ve ever done before.”
Knowing where and how much snow and rain falls globally is vital to understanding how weather and climate impact both our environment and Earth’s energy cycles, including effects on agriculture, fresh water availability, and responses to natural disasters.
Snowfall is a missing part of the puzzle, and GPM will fill those pieces in.
Find out more about the GPM program at pmm.nasa.gov/GPM.
GPM Core is currently being assembled at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and scheduled to launch in 2014 on a Japanese H-IIA rocket. Initiated by NASA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), GPM consists of a consortium of international agencies, including the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), and others.