2015年2月28日 星期六

Moon Venus Mars Skyline



Taken on February 20, five different exposures made in rapid succession were used to created this tantalizing telephoto image. In combination, they reveal a wide range of brightness visible to the eye on that frigid evening, from the urban glow of the Quebec City skyline to the triple conjunction of Moon, Venus and Mars. Shortly after sunset the young Moon shows off its bright crescent next to brilliant Venus. Fainter Mars is near the top of the frame. Though details in the Moon's sunlit crescent are washed out, features on the dark, shadowed part of the lunar disk are remarkably clear. Still lacking city lights the lunar night is illuminated solely by earthshine, light reflected from the sunlit side of planet Earth. via NASA http://ift.tt/1LU3clN

Leonard Nimoy: A Science Fan’s Appreciation

Mat Kaplan pays a heartfelt tribute to a science fiction icon.



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Astronaut Salutes Nimoy From Orbit



International Space Station astronaut Terry Virts (@AstroTerry) tweeted this image of a Vulcan hand salute from orbit as a tribute to actor Leonard Nimoy, who died on Friday, Feb. 27, 2015. Nimoy played science officer Mr. Spock in the Star Trek series that served as an inspiration to generations of scientists, engineers and sci-fi fans around the world. Cape Cod and Boston, Massachusetts, Nimoy's home town, are visible through the station window. via NASA http://ift.tt/1Anq0nv

Ticket to Space

My friend Dan Durda is many things: an astronomer, a planetary scientist, an artist, a pilot.


He’s also an astronaut. Or he will be, very soon.


He works at Southwest Research Institute here in Boulder, Colorado, which is a company that does a lot of work in space; the New Horizons Pluto probe instruments were developed there, for example, and the principal investigator, Alan Stern, is there. Dan’s very interested in the behavior and structure of asteroids, which is difficult to study here on Earth.


So he and his fellow scientists at SwRI got an idea: Go into space.


We’re at the doorstep of cheaper, more reliable access to space. Ticket prices are within reach of wealthy individuals and, perhaps more importantly, companies that do science. A lot of Dan’s experiments can be done easily in the few minutes of weightlessness these suborbital flights provide.


But why not get all this from Dan himself? He recently gave a TEDxBoulder talk about this, and it’s really good.


What he said is true: We’re just starting off doing this work, and we don’t know where it will lead. There have been setbacks, for sure; the loss of the Virgin Galactic vehicle and its pilot last year, and the explosion of the Antares rocket upon liftoff.


As I have written many times before, while tragic, these sorts of losses are inevitable. They are the price we pay for pushing boundaries, and you’ll find most astronauts understand these risks. To use an analogy Dan made in the video, where would be now if airplane crashes grounded the airline industry in the early 20th century?


We’ll continue on, pushing our way into space. Again, as Dan points out, we cannot know where this will lead … except up. And that’s a direction I think we should go.






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2015年2月27日 星期五

Long Lovejoy and Little Dumbbell



Buffeted by the solar wind, Comet Lovejoy's crooked ion tail stretches over 3 degrees across this telescopic field of view, recorded on February 20. The starry background includes awesome bluish star Phi Persei below, and pretty planetary nebula M76 just above Lovejoy's long tail. Also known as the Little Dumbbell Nebula, after its brighter cousin M27 the Dumbbell Nebula, M76 is only a Full Moon's width away from the comet's greenish coma. Still shining in northern hemisphere skies, this Comet Lovejoy (C/2014 Q2) is outbound from the inner solar system some 10 light-minutes or 190 million kilometers from Earth. But the Little Dumbbell actually lies over 3 thousand light-years away. Now sweeping steadily north toward the constellation Cassiopeia Comet Lovejoy is fading more slowly than predicted and is still a good target for small telescopes. via NASA http://ift.tt/1wtBkn2

Highlights from our reddit Space Policy AMA

The space policy and advocacy team at The Planetary Society held an AMA (ask me anything) on reddit, here are some of the highlights.



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NASA Administrator Remembers Leonard Nimoy

NASA Administrator Remembers Leonard Nimoy



February 27, 2015

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Pluto Science, on the Surface

New Horizons' Principal Investigator Alan Stern gives an update on the mission's progress toward Pluto.



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NASA Sets Coverage for Launch of Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission

NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission is set to lift off at 10:44 p.m. EDT Thursday, March 12 from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. There is a 30-minute window for the launch.



February 27, 2015

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Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy, CNN "Leonard Nimoy, whose portrayal of "Star Trek's" logic-driven, half-human science officer Spock made him an iconic figure to generations, died Friday. He was 83."...



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Who Has More Relevant Capsule Expertise?

Boeing throws shade on SpaceX ability to understand tasks - says Boeing has built every U.S. capsule & still has that experience 1/2— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) February 27, 2015 Of course this is silly since Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo...



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The More Space Stations, The Better

Russia Will Spin-Off ISS Parts for New Space Station, Discovery News "The Russian space agency Roscosmos says it will support U.S. plans to keep the International Space Station (ISS) operating through 2024, but then wants to split off three still-to-be...



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The Usual Suspects Want Their Government Handout

New Alliance To Promote Space Development and Settlement Policies, Space News "Perhaps the most ambitious part of the ASD agenda is a proposed "Cheap Access to Space Act" that would offer $3.5 billion in government prizes for the development of...



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2015年2月26日 星期四

Love and War by Moonlight



Venus, named for the Roman goddess of love, and Mars, the war god's namesake, came together by moonlight in this lovely skyview, recorded on February 20 from Charleston, South Carolina, USA, planet Earth. Made in twilight with a digital camera, the three second time exposure also records earthshine illuminating the otherwise dark surface of the young crescent Moon. Of course, the Moon has moved on from this much anticipated triple conjunction. Venus still shines in the west though as the evening star, third brightest object in Earth's sky, after the Sun and the Moon itself. Seen here within almost a Moon's width of Venus, much fainter Mars approached even closer on the following evening. But Mars has since been moving slowly away from brilliant Venus, though Mars is still visible too in the western twilight. via NASA http://ift.tt/1MTykFj

New NASA Earth Science Missions Expand View of Our Home Planet

Four new NASA Earth-observing missions are collecting data from space – with a fifth newly in orbit – after the busiest year of NASA Earth science launches in more than a decade.



February 26, 2015

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Russia Moves to Support ISS through 2024, Create New Space Station

The future of the International Space Station is a little clearer this week, following a statement from Russia supporting an extension of the orbiting complex through 2024.



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Feb. 26, 1966 Launch of Apollo-Saturn 201



Apollo-Saturn 201 (AS-201), the first Saturn IB launch vehicle developed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:12 a.m. on Feb. 26, 1966. The AS-201 mission was an unmanned suborbital flight to test the Saturn 1B launch vehicle and the Apollo Command and Service Modules. This was the first flight of the S-IB and S-IVB stages, including the first flight test of the liquid-hydrogen/liquid oxygen-propelled J-2 engine in the S-IVB stage. During the thirty-seven minute flight, the vehicle reached an altitude of 303 miles and traveled 5,264 miles downrange. Image Credit: NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/1LMExl9

Kepler-432b: A Doomed Planet Orbiting a Doomed Star

Two independent teams of astronomers have just announced the discovery of an unusual planet with a grim future: Kepler-432b.


The planet orbits a star nearly 3,000 light-years away and was discovered using the Kepler observatory, which looks for telltale dips in star light as a planet orbits a star; if the planet’s orbit is seen edge-on from Earth, then once per orbit it blocks a small fraction of the star when it passes directly between the star and Earth.


Measuring the timing of the dip (and knowing some of the properties of the star) yields a lot of information about the planet, including its size, and the size and shape of its orbit. They also took spectra of the star, breaking its light up into thousands of individual colors, which yields one more crucial piece of information: the mass of the planet. The planet and star orbit a common center of gravity, and as the star moves in its orbit its spectrum changes due to the Doppler shift. This effect is pretty dang small, but measurable using precision instruments.


The results are pretty cool: The planet Kepler-432b is roughly five times more massive than Jupiter, but only about 1.1 times as wide. This makes it pretty dense, about as dense as Earth! Gas giants have a weird property that as they get more massive their size doesn’t increase much—instead, the pressure inside them increases, and their density goes way up. Jupiter is right at about the lower limit where that happens, so planets can be much beefier than Jupiter but not much bigger.


But what makes this system special is the star itself. It’s a little more massive than the Sun, but it’s what we call a red giant: A star that is starting to die.


At some point in the past, the star Kepler-432 ran out of hydrogen fuel in its core. The core of the star is shrinking and heating up, dumping all that heat into its outer layers. What happens to a gas when you heat it up? It expands. And so Kepler-432 has swollen up to a size about four times wider than our Sun. As it got bigger its surface area increased, too, and so, weirdly, the amount of energy coming through its surface per square centimeter has actually dropped, lowering its temperature. Cooler stars are red, so Kepler-432 is a red giant.


It will continue to grow as it ages, swelling to a much larger size than it is now. Much larger. Will it engulf the planet?


It may not grow enough to swallow the planet directly. However, as it gets bigger, it interacts with the planet via tides, and (through a complicated series of steps) will actually drop the planet closer in to the star.


It looks like this one-two punch is enough to doom the planet. The star will grow larger, the planet’s orbit will shrink, and then … doom. The planet will fall into the star, where it will plunge deeper and deeper, until it evaporates completely.


But don’t despair too much. As the planet falls inside the star, it takes a while to disintegrate. It orbits much faster than the star spins, so it may churn up the insides of the star like a whisk in a mixing bowl of batter. The star’s rotation will increase. As the star continues to age, it will fling off its outer layers, exposing the hot core at its center. This very dense, very hot object, now called a white dwarf, will blast ultraviolet light into space, illuminating and exciting the gas it ejected, causing it to glow. Because the star was spinning, this gas can take on fantastic shapes, including double-lobed patterns reminiscent of butterfly wings.


Scientifically, this system is fascinating; we don’t have too many examples of giant planets orbiting red giant stars (which may be in part due to the fact that they tend to fall into their stars!), so every one we find is important. The planet orbits the star on a long ellipse, too, which is unusual and difficult to explain. There are many mysteries to plumb here.


And metaphorically, well, this transformation is almost too on-the-nose: Like a caterpillar, the planet and star will transform into something magnificent, literally a butterfly shape. And it will glow fiercely like that for centuries, its beauty visible easily from telescopes even thousands of light years away.


The Universe is all about change, birth, destruction … and given that, perhaps Kepler-432b’s eventual fate isn’t such a bad one.


Postscript: You can read the papers published by the two teams who studied this planet: Ciceri et al ., and Ortiz et al . Their results match pretty well, though, interestingly, Ciceri et al. find no evidence for a second planet orbiting the star, while Ortiz et al. do. Also, Ciceri et al. conclude the planet won’t be engulfed. I don’t think they included the work showing the planet’s orbital radius will shrink, though, which was considered by Ortiz et al., so I tend to agree with Ortiz’s team. The planet is doomed.






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2015年2月25日 星期三

The Rosette Nebula in Hydrogen and Oxygen



The Rosette Nebula is not the only cosmic cloud of gas and dust to evoke the imagery of flowers -- but it is the most famous. At the edge of a large molecular cloud in Monoceros, some 5,000 light years away, the petals of this rose are actually a stellar nursery whose lovely, symmetric shape is sculpted by the winds and radiation from its central cluster of hot young stars. The stars in the energetic cluster, cataloged as NGC 2244, are only a few million years old, while the central cavity in the Rosette Nebula, cataloged as NGC 2237, is about 50 light-years in diameter. The nebula can be seen firsthand with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Unicorn (Monoceros). via NASA http://ift.tt/1Bq8g1Q

At last, Ceres is a geological world

I've been resisting all urges to speculate on what kinds of geological features are present on Ceres, until now. Finally, Dawn has gotten close enough that the pictures it has returned show geology: bright spots, flat-floored craters, and enigmatic grooves.



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Pete Worden is Leaving NASA

Keith's note: NASA Ames Research Center Director Pete Worden will announce this afternoon that he is leaving NASA at the end of March....



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NASA Spacecraft Prepares for March 12 Launch to Study Earth’s Dynamic Magnetic Space Environment

Final preparations are underway for the launch of NASA’s quartet of Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft, which constitute the first space mission dedicated to the study of magnetic reconnection. This fundamental process occurs throughout the universe where magnetic fields connect and disconnect with an explosive release of energy.



February 25, 2015

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Dawn Journal: Ceres' Deepening Mysteries

Even as we discover more about Ceres, some mysteries only deepen. Mission Director Marc Rayman gives an update on Dawn as it moves ever closer to its next target.



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NASA Offers Space Tech Grants to Early Career University Faculty

NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate is seeking proposals from accredited U.S. universities on behalf of outstanding early-career faculty members who are beginning independent research careers. The grants will sponsor research in specific high-priority areas of interest to America's space program.



February 25, 2015

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Tempest Vermilion

Gavin Heffernan is a photographer who travels to difficult-to-reach locations and shoots simply tremendous time-lapse videos of the landscape and night sky he sees there.


He just sent me a note that he’s created another video, and, well, holy wow. It’s another stunner: “Tempest Vermilion,” shot at the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument in Arizona.


You know the drill: Make it full screen, set it to high-def, crank up the volume, and let your eyes and brain soak it up.


Photographic stills from the shoot are on Flickr.


This is the second part of a trilogy of videos Heffernan has created for BBC 2; the first, called “Wavelight,” is online as well. He and his collaborator, Harun Mehmedinovic, are also making a video about the effects of light pollution. Called “Skyglow,” it’ll be on Kickstarter in early April. Stay tuned for that.


In the meantime, take a look at these other amazing videos by Heffernan:


Time-Lapse: Kings Canyon

Time-Lapse: YIKÁÍSDÁHÁ
Death Valley DreamLapse
Predators and Prey, Dragons and Dark Skies






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Chicago in Winter



From the International Space Station (ISS), European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti took this photograph of Chicago and posted it to social media on Feb. 19, 2015. She wrote, "How do you like #Chicago dressed for winter?" Crewmembers on the space station photograph the Earth from their unique point of view located 200 miles above the surface as part of the Crew Earth Observations program. Photographs record how the planet is changing over time, from human-caused changes like urban growth and reservoir construction, to natural dynamic events such as hurricanes, floods and volcanic eruptions. Astronauts have used hand-held cameras to photograph the Earth for more than 40 years, beginning with the Mercury missions in the early 1960s. The ISS maintains an altitude between 220 - 286 miles (354 - 460 km) above the Earth, and an orbital inclination of 51.6˚, providing an excellent stage for observing most populated areas of the world. Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Samantha Cristoforetti via NASA http://ift.tt/1wdNNpq

OIG Has Doubts About NASA's Humans to Mars Plans

NASA OIG Testimony, NASA Oversight Hearing "As we reported in August 2013, even after the SLS and Orion are fully developed and ready to transport crew NASA will continue to face significant challenges concerning the long-term sustainability of its human...



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A Supermassive Black Hole’s Fiery and Furious Wind

When you think of black holes, you probably think they are chaotic destroyers of all; wandering through space devouring everything in their path, and once something gets too close, it’s gone forever.


That’s a little unfair. Actually, a lot unfair. They only eat stuff that’s nearby, for one thing. And for another, they’re sloppy eaters. Not everything falls straight down their gullet; a lot of it can swirl around the black hole in what’s called an accretion disk. Material in that disk can be heated to terrifyingly high temperatures, millions of degrees, causing it to glow fiercely bright. It can blast out X-rays, and even create an intensely strong wind of material that flows away from the black hole.


We also know that every big galaxy we look at has a supermassive black hole in its very center. If that black hole has gas and matter falling into it, the accretion disk can be huge and ridiculously, soul-crushingly bright. The luminosity of such an object can easily outshine the hundreds of billions of stars in the host galaxy, and make the black hole visible clear across the Universe.


This sets up an interesting problem. When you have a monster in the middle like that, how does it affect the rest of the galaxy? A curious fact was discovered many years ago; the mass of the black hole in a galaxy seems to correlate with how the stars in the galaxy orbit. You might think “duh” to that, but hang on. Even though a black hole can have a mass of a billion times the Sun, that’s a teeny tiny fraction of the mass of a galaxy with a few hundred billion stars in it.


Somehow, the black hole is affecting the galaxy around it on a huge scale. How?


The obvious way is through this wind, this cosmic hurricane of particles blasting outward from it at high fractions of the speed of light. Studying that wind is maddeningly difficult, though. For example, when we look right at the center of the galaxy, all we can see is the extremely narrow slice of gas between us and the black hole. That gas absorbs the light coming from the accretion disk, blocking it. As it happens, different kinds of atoms block different colors of light. One type of iron, for example, that has a lot of its electrons ripped away from the intense energy blasting away nearby, is really good at absorbing a very specific wavelength of X-rays.


That can tell you something about the gas, like how hot it is, and how fast the gas is moving away from the black hole. But what it doesn’t tell you is the overall shape of the wind. Is it blowing out spherically, like an expanding balloon, or is it focused into narrow beams?


Lots of black holes have those beams screaming away from them. We know this because we can see them. But not every black hole has them. So how can you figure out the shape of the wind?


Some astronomers have just announced they found a way. The black hole they observed is a billion-solar-mass beast in the center of the galaxy PDS 456, which is about 2 billion light-years away. It’s fairly well studied, and is a good example of a typical “active galaxy,” one with an actively feeding black hole in its core.


They observed it using two different observatories: XMM-Newton and NuSTAR. Both can sort incoming X-rays into their individual energies (think of that like color in light we see). XMM-Newton could see the gas blocking the black hole directly, but can’t detect any gas anywhere else. NuSTAR, however, is able to see the kind of X-rays that would be coming from gas surrounding the black hole … and it did. Looking at the spectrum of the X-rays, it found the unmistakable signature of gas expanding outward in a sphere (if you want technical stuff, it saw a classic P-Cygni profile).


This is a big deal. The geometry of the expanding wind can tell us its total energy. Think of it this way: Imagine you have a 1-watt light bulb. It looks pretty dim, because it’s sending light out in all directions. Only a little bit of the light is heading into your eye. But if I have a flashlight, it focuses the energy emitted, so it can gather up all the light being wasted in other directions and beam it toward you. The bulb in a flashlight can be a lot dimmer, but still look brighter to you because of that.


And that’s the basis of these new observations. They saw that the wind from the black hole is expanding in all directions, which means the astronomers could determine the overall physical nature of the wind. It turns out the black hole is blasting a wind that totals 10 times the Sun’s mass every year—and mind you, that vast amount of stuff is screaming out at tens of thousands of kilometers per second. If I’ve done my math right (and I have; I checked), that means the mechanical energy in that wind is a staggering 10 trillion times the total energy the Sun emits every second.


Ten trillion.


And that wind is blowing outward in all directions, so it can easily affect the gas around it, even thousands of light-years away. This in turn would affect how stars form in a galaxy, and explain the relationship we see between the black hole and the stars in the galaxy around it.


And here’s the really cool thing: We think those big black holes form at the same time as the galaxy itself. As the zillions of tons of gas swirl around in the proto-galaxy, assembling itself into stars, some of it is falling into the nascent black hole in the center of that maelstrom. It forms a disk around the black hole, heats up, and starts to blast out a wind. This wind slams into the gas around it, all around it, blowing it hither and yon.


When the galaxy finally coalesces as a massive island universe of billions of stars, the motions of the stars themselves still have the fingerprint of the black hole’s wind imprinted on them, even billions of years later. And that wind may have helped trigger more stars being born as it rams into and compresses the gas around it, just as it can also shut down star formation by blowing that gas away.


Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has such a black hole in the middle. It’s not a big one as they go, a mere 4 million times the mass of the Sun. But 10 billion years ago, when our galaxy was forming, it may have been active, and may have affected the young galaxy around it as well.


When you go outside at night and look at the stars, think on that. If you can see Sagittarius, you’re looking toward the center of our galaxy, where that monster dwells. It’s surrounded by billions of stars, so distant from us their light merges into a soft glow. But they’re there, those myriad stars, and their motions, their formation, even their existence itself may have been profoundly influenced by a black hole that we didn’t even know existed until a few decades ago.


Ah, science. It allows us to wonder about the inner workings of the Universe we live in, and then shows us how the pieces fit together. If there is a grander, more exhilarating adventure than that, I don’t know what it is.






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2015年2月24日 星期二

Ask Me Anything (on reddit) About NASA's Budget

Starting at 11am PST/2pm EST on Wednesday, the space policy team at the Society will hold an AMA (Ask Me Anything) about NASA's new budget and the process of space exploration.



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Unusual Plumes Above Mars



What is creating unusual plumes on Mars? No one is sure. Noted and confirmed by a global contingent of amateur astronomers on photos of the red planet in March 2012, possibly similar plumes have now been found on archived images as far back as 1997. Since the plumes reach 200 kilometers up, they seem too high to be related to wind-blown surface dust. Since one plume lasted for eleven days, it seemed too long lasting to be related to aurora. Amateur astronomers will surely continue to monitor the terminator and edge regions of Mars for new high plumes, and the armada of satellites orbiting Mars may be called upon to verify and study any newly reported plume that become visible. The featured 35-minute time-lapse animation was taken on 2012 March 20 by the plume's discoverer -- an attorney from Pennsylvania, USA. via NASA http://ift.tt/1A2p3kk

UPDATE -- NASA Reschedules MMS Briefing to 3 p.m. EST Feb. 25

NASA has rescheduled to 3 p.m. EST Wednesday, Feb. 25, a briefing on an upcoming mission to study magnetic reconnection around the Earth, a fundamental process that occurs throughout the universe where magnetic fields connect and disconnect explosively releasing energy.



February 24, 2015

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NASA Briefing to Discuss First Spacecraft Arrival at a Dwarf Planet

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will host a briefing at noon EST (9 a.m. PST) Monday, March 2, to discuss the March 6 arrival of the agency’s Dawn spacecraft at the dwarf planet Ceres. The news briefing, held at JPL’s von Karman Auditorium at 4800 Oak Grove Dr., Pasadena, California, will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency’s website.



February 24, 2015

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2015年2月23日 星期一

The Milky Way Over the Arizona Toadstools



Which is older -- the rocks you see on the ground or the light you see from the sky? Usually it’s the rocks that are older, with their origin sediments deposited well before light left any of the stars or nebulas you see in the sky. However, if you can see, through a telescope, a distant galaxy far across the universe -- further than Andromeda or spiral galaxy NGC 7331 (inset) -- then you are seeing light even more ancient. Featured here, the central disk of our Milky Way Galaxy arches over Toadstool hoodoos rock formations in northern Arizona, USA. The unusual Toadstool rock caps are relatively hard sandstone that wind has eroded more slowly than the softer sandstone underneath. The green bands are airglow, light emitted by the stimulated air in Earth's atmosphere. On the lower right is a time-lapse camera set up to capture the sky rotating behind the picturesque foreground scene. via NASA http://ift.tt/17LEjv7

Fixing ARM So That It Makes (Some) Sense

Let's Fix the Asteroid Redirect Mission, Marcia Smith Aviation Week "Fundamentally, ARM is two good ideas kluged together into one bewildering idea that NASA itself seems unable to explain effectively. NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden's hand-picked advisers on the NASA Advisory...



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NASA Hosts Media Briefing on Mission to Study Dynamic Magnetic System Around Earth

NASA will hold a media briefing at 1 p.m. EST Wednesday, Feb. 25, to discuss an upcoming mission to study magnetic reconnection around Earth, a fundamental process throughout the universe where magnetic fields connect and disconnect explosively releasing energy.



February 23, 2015

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Spacewalk Timelapse Makes Cable Routing Look Fun

A timelapse video shows two NASA astronauts as they became typical neighborhood cable technicians—except for the fact that they were wearing space suits.



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Jurczyk To Head Space Technology Mission Directorate

Steve Jurczyk Named Head of NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate "NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has named Steve Jurczyk as the agency's Associate Administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate, effective Monday, March 2. The directorate is responsible for innovating, developing,...



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Jurczyk Named Head of NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has named Steve Jurczyk as the agency's Associate Administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate, effective Monday, March 2. The directorate is responsible for innovating, developing, testing and flying hardware for use on future NASA missions.



February 23, 2015

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Throwing Shade on Mars One

Mars Missions Are A Scam, BuzzFeed "Last week, the nonprofit reality-television project Mars One announced its selection of 100 volunteers who may get one-way tickets to Mars. It's only the latest in decades of celebrated Mars colonization projects. And just...



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Yet Another Space Group: The Space Illuminati

Keith's note: Wow, the space advocacy community has been rather fertile this past week spawning not one but two new organizations - all of this on the heels of a anonymous meeting of the usual space advocacy suspects. This...



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NASA Briefing to Highlight Early Results from New Earth Science Missions

Over the past 12 months NASA has added five missions to its orbiting Earth-observing fleet – the biggest one-year increase in more than a decade. NASA scientists will discuss early observations from the new missions and their current status during a media teleconference at 2 p.m. EST Thursday, Feb. 26.



February 23, 2015

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Clouds and Chasmata

New landscapes from Mars Express.



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Astronaut Barry Wilmore on the First of Three Spacewalks



NASA astronaut Barry Wilmore works outside the International Space Station on the first of three spacewalks preparing the station for future arrivals by U.S. commercial crew spacecraft, Saturday, Feb. 21, 2015. Fellow spacewalker Terry Virts, seen reflected in the visor, shared this photograph on social media. The spacewalks are designed to lay cables along the forward end of the U.S. segment to bring power and communication to two International Docking Adapters slated to arrive later this year. The new docking ports will welcome U.S. commercial spacecraft launching from Florida beginning in 2017, permitting the standard station crew size to grow from six to seven and potentially double the amount of crew time devoted to research. The second and third spacewalks are planned for Wednesday, Feb. 25 and Sunday, March 1, with Wilmore and Virts participating in all three. Image Credit: NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/1Be2FLU

Alliance for Space Development Revealed (Yawn)

Space Frontier Foundation and National Space Society Announce the Formation of the Alliance for Space Development "At press time, the LifeBoat Foundation, The Mars Society, The Mars Foundation, The Space Development Steering Committee, The Space Tourism Society, Students for the...



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Commercial Space Hearings This Week

Congressional Hearings this Week to Focus on Commercial Space, SpaceRef "There will be two important congressional hearings this week on Commercial Space. First up on Tuesday, February 24th is the U.S. Human Exploration Goals and Commercial Space Competitiveness Senate Subcommittee...



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Mooning Pluto

Pluto is an interesting little world. Smaller than our Moon, it still boasts no fewer than five moons discovered so far. The first, Charon, was discovered in 1978, but the second through fifth were found just a few years ago using Hubble data.


How many does Pluto have? It’s not known, because smaller, fainter moons may yet be undiscovered. But as the New Horizons probe nears Pluto, we may find more.


Charon is big and relatively bright, and has been seen in New Horizons images since 2013. But now two of the smaller moons, Nix and Hydra, have been spotted as well!


The animation on the left shows Pluto heavily overexposed (the bright tail off to the right is called blooming, and it’s an artifact of some digital detectors), with stars in the background. The moons have boxes around them to make them easier to spot. The animation on the right has the stars subtracted off, making it easier to see the moons’ orbital motions around their parent body. To give you a sense of scale, Nix and Hydra orbit about 50,000 and 65,000 km out from Pluto. The moon’s physical sizes are unknown, though less than 100 km across. They’re unresolved in these images, and in the Hubble images as well. When New Horizons gets closer it will certainly give us a far better idea about these little guys.


Each frame of each animation is a total of a 50 second exposure, which is pretty impressive. New Horizons is moving pretty fast, about 14 km/sec, so it needs to take short exposures as it flies through the Pluto system or else there will be motion blur.


These images are mere tastes of what’s to come. In the months ahead we’ll see Pluto resolved, surface features revealing themselves, and more detail on these moons as well. Perhaps the probe will discover more moons circling Pluto, too.


Hopefully it will shed light on how the moons formed; one current theory is that Pluto and Charon formed at the same time, out of the material that formed all the icy bodies past Neptune. Then, later, an impact on Pluto blasted chunks into space, which formed the other moons. Pluto doesn’t have a lot of gravity, but it also lacks nearby neighbors, so it can hold on to several moons without losing them due to perturbations from other massive bodies. We know many asteroids and other big icy objects past Neptune have moons, so seeing these close up may be able to help us understand how they came to be in the first place.






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2015年2月22日 星期日

The Dark River to Antares



Connecting the Pipe Nebula to the colorful region near bright star Antares is a dark cloud dubbed the Dark River, flowing from the picture's left edge. Murky looking, the Dark River's appearance is caused by dust obscuring background starlight, although the dark nebula contains mostly hydrogen and molecular gas. Surrounded by dust, Antares, a red supergiant star, creates an unusual bright yellowish reflection nebula. Above it, bright blue double star Rho Ophiuchi is embedded in one of the more typical bluish reflection nebulae, while red emission nebulae are also scattered around the region. Globular star cluster M4 is just seen above and right of Antares, though it lies far behind the colorful clouds, at a distance of some 7,000 light-years. The Dark River itself is about 500 light years away. The colorful skyscape is a mosaic of telescopic images spanning nearly 10 degrees (20 Full Moons) across the sky in the constellation of the Scorpion (Scorpius). via NASA http://ift.tt/1B3A4ZG

Sonja Alexander Maclin

Keith's note: Sonja Alexander Maclin has passed away. Details to follow. She was always the nicest person I talked to at NASA Headquarters - on any topic....



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Recent Space Poll: Public is Not Always in Synch With Space Advocates

Poll: Space Travel in the 21st Century: American Public Sees Benefits But Balks at Cost, Monmouth University "This week marks the 53rd anniversary of John Glenn's first manned orbital space flight. The Monmouth University Poll finds that most Americans feel...



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Conspiracy Revealed: The Simpsons Has Been Lying to You

I’ve been a fan of The Simpsons for a long time. Obviously. So when I heard that SpaceX’s head guy Elon Musk was guest-starring on the show, I hoped it would be a good episode. And it was! As I watched I marveled at how funny the show was even after all these decades, and laughed quite a bit as the story unfolded.


… until a scene came up that chilled me to the bone. I was so shocked that I had to rewind and watch it again, then freeze frame it to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.


This is the moment that changed everything for me. The frozen moment of time when I realized that for 22 years, The Simpsons has been lying to us.


This shows Musk standing at the dining room window of the Simpson’s house, looking out and pontificating at the night sky as the family behind him eats dinner.


But look at the Moon. LOOK AT THE MOON!


It’s backwards. The scene is clearly at dinner, early evening, so that’s the setting crescent new Moon. But in the northern hemisphere, the tips of a waxing crescent Moon point to the left, away from the Sun. Here’s a photo I took myself in November 2013:


See? I took that picture shortly after sunset, around dinner time. It was new Moon, and the crescent's tips point to the left. But in that scene with Musk, they point to the right! How can that be?


There’s only one way. Springfield is not in the United States at all. It’s not even in our half of the world. Springfield is in the southern hemisphere!


I don’t even know how to react to this information. It’s as if… my whole world has been turned upside down.






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2015年2月21日 星期六

45 Days in the Sun



From January 11 to February 25 2013, a pinhole camera sat in a field near Budapest, Hungary, planet Earth to create this intriguing solargraph. And for 45 days, an old Antonov An-2 biplane stood still while the Sun rose and set. The camera's continuous exposure began about 20 days after the northern hemispere's winter solstice, so each day the Sun's trail arcs steadily higher through the sky. These days in the Sun were recorded on a piece of black and white photosensitive paper tucked in to the simple plastic film container. The long exposure produced a visible color image on the paper that was then digitally scanned. Of course, cloudy days left gaps in the solargraph's Sun trails. via NASA http://ift.tt/1vmNiy5

Pioneering Space National Summit Details Emerge

Keith's note: Something has emerged from the Pioneering Space National Summit held last week in Washington DC on Facebook (larger view) The event barred press coverage and did not include a number of space advocacy organizations - including the...



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Antares Explosion Might Not Be It's Engine's Fault

Orbital explosion probe said to find debris in engine: sources, Reuters "Last October's explosion of Orbital ATK Inc's Antares rocket may have been triggered when debris inadvertently left in a fuel tank traveled into the booster's main engine, two people...



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2015年2月20日 星期五

An Evening Sky Conjunction



Eight years ago, an evening sky held this lovely pairing of a young crescent Moon and brilliant Venus. Seen near the western horizon, the close conjunction and its wintry reflection were captured from Bolu, Turkey, planet Earth on February 19, 2007. In the 8 Earth years since this photograph was taken Venus has orbited the Sun almost exactly 13 times, so the Sun and Venus have now returned to the same the configuration in Earth's sky. And since every 8 years the Moon also nearly repeats its phases for a given time of year, a very similar crescent Moon-Venus conjunction will again appear in planet Earth's evening skies tonight. But the February 20, 2015 version of the conjunction will also include planet Mars. Much fainter Mars will wander even closer to Venus by the evening of February 21. via NASA http://ift.tt/17yarSS

Curiosity update, sols 864-895: Drilling at Pink Cliffs

Curiosity's second drilling campaign at the foot of Mount Sharp is complete. The rover spent about a month near Pink Cliffs, an area at the base of the Pahrump Hills outcrop, drilling and documenting a site named Mojave, where lighter-colored crystals were scattered through a very fine-grained rock.



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Alliance for Space Development: Yawn - Yet Another Space Group

Keith's note: I just got this from the "Alliance for Space Development - Seminary Road - Alexandria, Va 22311 - USA" today who proclaims: "You're invited! To an announcement of the formation of a new coalition of organizations focused...



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John Glenn During the Mercury-Atlas 6 Spaceflight



On Feb. 20, 1962, astronaut John H. Glenn, Jr., became the first American to orbit Earth. Launched from Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 14, Glenn's Mercury-Atlas 6 "Friendship 7" spacecraft completed a successful three-orbit mission, reaching a maximum altitude (apogee) of approximately 162 statute miles and an orbital velocity of approximately 17,500 miles per hour. The flight lasted a total of 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds before the spacecraft splashed down in the ocean. This photograph of John Glenn during the Mercury-Atlas 6 spaceflight was taken by a camera onboard the spacecraft. Image Credit: NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/1CSKR3Z

Expedition 42 Spacewalks Postponed by a Day

Updated Dates Announced for Space Station U.S. Spacewalks, NASA "Space station managers decided Thursday to move the first two spacewalks by NASA's Expedition 42 Commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Flight Engineer Terry Virts by one day because of added analysis...



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Crash Course Astronomy Episode 6: Telescopes

By number, I’d say I go outside and use just my eyeballs to look at the stars more than any other method. Every time I step outside, the first thing I do is look up. Even during the day: I wouldn’t want to miss the Moon, some Sun-induced optical phenomena, iridescent clouds, or maybe even the eye-wateringly hard-to-spot Venus in the clear blue sky.


And at night, there are familiar constellations, planets, the odd meteor or two, and satellites streaming overhead. These are all fun to see with your unaided eyes.


But there are times when a little magnification is needed. In those cases you’re far more likely to find me with binoculars up to my eyes, scanning the heavens for various objects. And then, when I’m feeling ambitious, out comes the telescope, in goes the eyepiece, and down goes my evening as I hop from one distant world to another.


But … how does a telescope work?


I’m glad you asked. Here’s my answer, cleverly embedded in this week’s Crash Course Astronomy episode!


I hope that helps! If you get anything out of that episode, let it be that telescopes help resolve objects, make fainter objects appear brighter, and let us see invisible forms of light. And before you ask, I have advice on how to buy a telescope, too.


That reminds me: An FAQ I get is, “What observing equipment do you use?” I have it on my list of Things I Need to Actually Write About Eventually When I Think About Them When I Actually Do Have Time to Write Them. And the list is longer than the title.


By the way, I'm extremely proud to say that Crash Course Astronomy passed a million total views this week! That's amazing to me. I'm really glad so many of you like the series. And I'm happy to say there are lots, lots more episodes to come. Here's the playlist of all the episodes so far. You can subscribe to Crash Course on YouTube, and don't forget subscribing to Subbable helps support the show as well.


Thank you to everyone who helps make this show happen. You are the Bernoulli effect above my wings.






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How LightSail Holds Its Place in Space

There are few systems aboard a spacecraft more important than attitude control. This infographic shows how LightSail holds its place in space.



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2015年2月19日 星期四

Palomar 12



Palomar 12 was not born here. The stars of the globular cluster, first identified in the Palomar Sky Survey, are younger than those in other globular star clusters that roam the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy. Palomar 12's position in our galaxy and measured motion suggest its home was once the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, a small satellite of the Milky Way. Disrupted by gravitational tides during close encounters the satellite galaxy has lost its stars to the larger Milky Way. Now part of the Milky Way's halo, the tidal capture of Palomar 12 likely took place some 1.7 billion years ago. Seen behind spiky foreground stars in the sharp Hubble image, Palomar 12 spans nearly 60 light-years. Still much closer than the faint, fuzzy, background galaxies scattered throughout the field of view, it lies about 60,000 light-years away, toward the constellation Capricornus. via NASA http://ift.tt/1AIGbm6

Why We Write to Congress

It's time to write to Congress in support of planetary exploration. Why? Because it works.



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Our Global Volunteer Network

The Planetary Society has amazing volunteers doing outreach work around the globe. Check out what they've been up to recently!



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NASA, ESA Telescopes Give Shape to Furious Black Hole Winds

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and ESA’s (European Space Agency) XMM-Newton telescope are showing that fierce winds from a supermassive black hole blow outward in all directions -- a phenomenon that had been suspected, but difficult to prove until now.



February 19, 2015

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Wolf Wrong on China - Johnson-Freese

Testimony from the Hearing on China's Space and Counterspace Programs, SpaceRef "The Senate U.S. - China Economic and Security Review Commission held a hearing on February 18, 2015 on China's Space and Counterspace Programs. All of the testimony is now...



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Magnetospheric Multiscale Observatories Processed for Launch



NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) observatories are processed for launch in a clean room at the Astrotech Space Operations facility in Titusville, Florida. MMS is an unprecedented NASA mission to study the mystery of how magnetic fields around Earth connect and disconnect, explosively releasing energy via a process known as magnetic reconnection. MMS consists of four identical spacecraft that work together to provide the first three-dimensional view of this fundamental process, which occurs throughout the universe. The mission observes reconnection directly in Earth's protective magnetic space environment, the magnetosphere. By studying reconnection in this local, natural laboratory, MMS helps us understand reconnection elsewhere as well, such as in the atmosphere of the sun and other stars, in the vicinity of black holes and neutron stars, and at the boundary between our solar system's heliosphere and interstellar space. MMS is a NASA mission led by the Goddard Space Flight Center. The instrument payload science team consists of researchers from a number of institutions and is led by the Southwest Research Institute. Launch of the four identical observatories aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station is managed by Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Services Program. Liftoff is currently targeted for 10:44 p.m. EDT on March 12. Image Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky via NASA http://ift.tt/17hsNrB

2015年2月18日 星期三

Dark Craters and Bright Spots Revealed on Asteroid Ceres



What are those bright spots on asteroid Ceres? As the robotic spacecraft Dawn approaches the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, the puzzle only deepens. Sharper new images taken last week and released yesterday indicate, as expected, that most of the surface of dwarf planet Ceres is dark and heavily cratered like our Moon and the planet Mercury. The new images do not clearly indicate, however, the nature of comparatively bright spots -- although more of them are seen to exist. The enigmatic spots were first noticed on Texas-sized Ceres a few weeks ago during Dawn's approach. The intriguing mystery might well be solved quickly as Dawn continues to advance toward Ceres, being on schedule to enter orbit on March 6. via NASA http://ift.tt/19v3l3c

Mapping Europa

Several global maps have been made of Europa, but amateur image processor Björn Jónsson felt they could be improved—so he decided to make a new one.



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New Horizons spots Nix and Hydra circling Pluto and Charon

A series of images just sent to Earth from New Horizons clearly shows Pluto's moons Nix and Hydra orbiting the Pluto-Charon binary.



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Is Mars Slowly And Surely Drawing Its Plans Against Us…?

Y’know, I’m not all that big on “Mystery Baffles Scientists!” kinda headline, but I have to admit, this scientific mystery is rather baffling.


What’s causing hundreds-of-kilometer-high plumes on Mars?


This is pretty weird. Amateur astronomers taking images of the Red Planet spotted cloud-like features well above the surface. And I do mean well; some are 250 kilometers in altitude. That’s way above where you normally find clouds.


They’ve been seen on multiple occasions, and by Hubble as well. They’re not image artifacts or some processing mistake in the pictures. They rotate with the planet, and are certainly real.


Mars has an atmosphere, though it’s thin, less than 1 percent of Earth’s pressure at sea level. It’s enough to stir up dust storms and other weather on Mars. It even can make clouds: As winds blow up the slopes of the planet’s huge volcanoes, for example, carbon dioxide can condense and form what are called orographic clouds (this happens on Earth too; I see it all the time since I live near the Rocky Mountains, with water instead of carbon dioxide of course).


Still, it’s hard to see how the Martian air could blow something like dust or CO2 as high as these plumes. It’s possible, though unlikely, that it could be some gas in the atmosphere that’s getting up that high, condensing, and forming reflective clouds.


But it’s just so far above what’s normally seen that this doesn’t hold water with me.


Another idea is that it’s auroral activity. Mars doesn’t have much of a magnetic field, but there are areas on the planet that do have stronger magnetic fields. The solar wind coming in from the Sun could be funneled into the atmosphere there, causing the glow. Although the press release doesn’t mention it, I suspect observing Mars in the ultraviolet might help; aurorae glow at those wavelengths.


You’d think that we have plenty of space probes orbiting the planet and that one of them would’ve seen something by now. The problem there is, in a way, being too close. The best way to see these things is on the edge of Mars, against the darkness of space. Most of the orbiting missions at Mars look straight down, and can’t see these plumes.


Not that observing them from Earth is all that easy. The problem is that these aren’t persistent features. They come and go, making observing them difficult. In cases like that, the best bet is brute force: Observe Mars a lot. Get as many telescopes observing it as often as possible and in as many ways as possible (imaging, video, different wavelengths, and so on). Small probability events become certainties given enough time.


I’d love to know what these things are. Giant plumes of gas erupting from Mars sounds little ominous to me. If there’s an observatory in Grover’s Mill, I hope it’s paying close attention.






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2015年2月17日 星期二

Fibrils Flower on the Sun



When does the Sun look like a flower? In a specific color of red light emitted by hydrogen, as featured here, some regions of the solar chromosphere may resemble a rose. The color-inverted image was taken in 2014 October and shows active solar region 2177. The petals dominating the frame are actually magnetically confined tubes of hot plasma called fibrils, some of which extend longer the diameter of the Earth. In the central region many of these fibrils are seen end-on, while the surrounding regions are typically populated with curved fibrils. When seen over the Sun's edge, these huge plasma tubes are called spicules, and when they occur in passive regions they are termed mottles. Sunspot region 2177 survived for several more days before the complex and tumultuous magnetic field poking through the Sun's surface evolved yet again. via NASA http://ift.tt/1FlCbJj

Space Advocates Work Together By Not Working Together

Space Groups Planning New and Revived Advocacy Activities, Space News "In a speech at the SpaceVision 2014 conference in November in Durham, North Carolina, Tumlinson indicated that participants in the event would be expected to come to a consensus on...



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Planetary CubeSats Begin to Come of Age

Van Kane rounds up some recent planetary mission concepts based on CubeSat technology.



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Public Curiosity Talk in Boulder on March 2

Hey, Boulderites! I’ll be giving a talk about Mars and the Curiosity rover at the Chautauqua Community House on March 2, 2015, at 7 p.m. The talk, “Where Has Our Curiosity Taken Us,” is an overview of the mission loaded with cool imagery and fun science.


I’ve given this talk here and there, and I really have fun going over the amazing things we’ve learned since the rover touched down in 2012. I’ll talk about the launch and landing, the roving, the photos, and the science Curiosity has undertaken.


Tickets are $10 ($7 for concert members), and as I write this, about half the seats are already sold. If you want to come, better get a ticket soon! I hope to see some BABloggees there.






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Getting Closer to Ceres

Dawn Captures Sharper Images of Ceres "Craters and mysterious bright spots are beginning to pop out in the latest images of Ceres from NASA's Dawn spacecraft. These images, taken Feb. 12 at a distance of 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) from...



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Getting Closer to Ceres

Dawn Captures Sharper Images of Ceres "Craters and mysterious bright spots are beginning to pop out in the latest images of Ceres from NASA's Dawn spacecraft. These images, taken Feb. 12 at a distance of 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) from...



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Dawn Approaches: Two Faces of Ceres



These two views of Ceres were acquired by NASA's Dawn spacecraft on Feb. 12, 2015, from a distance of about 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) as the dwarf planet rotated. The images have been magnified from their original size. The Dawn spacecraft is due to arrive at Ceres on March 6, 2015. Dawn's mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK, Inc., of Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The framing cameras were provided by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen, Germany, with significant contributions by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The visible and infrared mapping spectrometer was provided by the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, built by Selex ES, and is managed and operated by the Italian Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology, Rome. The gamma ray and neutron detector was built by Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, and is operated by the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA via NASA http://ift.tt/17e9246

Why Do Mirrors Reverse Left and Right but Not Up and Down?

I love brain teasers, especially when they’re based on real-world things we see every day but maybe don’t really think about.


I first heard of this one not too long ago: Why do mirrors reverse left and right, but not up and down? When you face yourself in the mirror, left and right are reversed, but you’re still right side up. Why?


The answer may not seem obvious because the question itself frames the problem incorrectly! It makes you try to solve the problem starting from the wrong premise. As it happens, Physics Girl has it covered:


Her use of written words and clothes is pretty clever, but the arrow was really good. That’s what makes it all clear: Mirrors don’t reverse left and right, they reverse in and out. Once you see that it all makes sense.


I really like demos like this; this connects physics to everyday life, and also shows that how you frame a problem is in many ways just as important as how you think about a problem.


I met Dianna, aka Physics Girl, last year at Comic Con; by coincidence I had just seen one of her videos and liked it. You should watch them; she has a knack for explaining things simply and well. I especially recommend the video about vortices in pools; it’s really cool, and these stable swirls of water are really fun to watch. I’ve spent some time in pools (and yes, in the bathtub) creating them and watching them propagate. They seem simple but are surprisingly complex phenomena, especially in how they interact with light.


And why not, here’s the video:


I’d suggest subscribing to her videos, and checking out her website, too. In my opinion, we can’t have enough good people out there communicating fun science. If you know of more, leave a comment below! I’m always looking for that sort of thing.






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2015年2月16日 星期一

M106: A Spiral Galaxy with a Strange Center



What's happening at the center of spiral galaxy M106? A swirling disk of stars and gas, M106's appearance is dominated by blue spiral arms and red dust lanes near the nucleus, as shown in the featured image. The core of M106 glows brightly in radio waves and X-rays where twin jets have been found running the length of the galaxy. An unusual central glow makes M106 one of the closest examples of the Seyfert class of galaxies, where vast amounts of glowing gas are thought to be falling into a central massive black hole. M106, also designated NGC 4258, is a relatively close 23.5 million light years away, spans 60 thousand light years across, and can be seen with a small telescope towards the constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici). via NASA http://ift.tt/17fSLLF

Rosetta Dips Low Over an Alien World

On Saturday, Valentine’s Day, the Rosetta spacecraft dipped down low over the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. How low? At one point, it was less than nine kilometers from the surface!


Given that the comet is 4.3 kilometers long and shaped like a rubber ducky that’s been sitting in the Sun for four billion years, this was a pretty low and gutsy pass. It was done to get extremely high-resolution pictures of the comet, of course, but the spacecraft will also be making a series of more distant passes to sample the environment around the comet at different locations.


Around the time of closest approach, the lower resolution NAVCAM instrument was used to snap photos of the comet. One of them showed the very, very weird Imhotep region of the comet, and, well, see for yourself:


Yeesh. What a mess! Imhotep is the name given to the broad, flattish area on the outer part of the bigger of the two lobes. The resolution on this image is staggering; it’s about 0.76 meters per pixel. A human standing on the surface would be just under three pixels long.


As you can see, the surface is ragged, littered with boulders, some the size of houses. There are two features in particular I want you to see.


That’s a closer view of the flat area at the upper left of the big picture (bear in mind I am not a cometologist, so I’m speculating a bit here; hopefully we’ll hear more from the Rosetta scientists about these features). This may be where ice under the comet’s surface is turned into gas when warmed by the Sun. As the gas escapes the comet, it leaves behind dust and gravel that can flow around; this may be a low spot in the surface that has been filled. Note the smooth area stops on the left just like water at a shoreline. But it’s not like a liquid, really; note the sharp step in the middle, a scarp that may be a slight collapse feature, where the ground suddenly gave way. It looks to be a few meters high.


The cliff-like region at the upper left looks very much like it’s been eroded, but not like it happens on Earth. There’s no water flow! In this case, it seems more likely that as ice turned to gas, the material erodes back, into the cliff, leaving behind the rocky material. Also, the those boulders may be chunks that have fallen and rolled into place, or exposed as icy material around them turns into gas and blows away.


Another fascinating area is this one:


Note the layering! On Earth or Mars (y’know, normal places) I’d wager a feature like that is from sedimentary action; deposited season after season by rains and flooding bringing sediment into a lake. But on a comet? I’d guess that this represents the exact opposite: As the comet orbits the Sun on an ellipse, it gets farther and nearer to our star. When it gets closer, the ice near the surface turning to gas will drop the surface down a bit, and that stops as the comet moves away from the Sun. Then the cycle starts up again, over and over. The plateau is probably rockier material, exposed more and more every orbit as the ice goes away.


Note also the circular crater-like features to the right. Those almost certainly aren’t impacts! More likely they are where gas is escaping the comet, the pits forming and growing over time as the area around the venting region loses ice.


Comets are really strange. They have extremely low gravity, their orbits determine their seasons, their erosive properties are backwards. That’s why I want to be clear with my caveats about not being a comet scientist! Places like this are hard enough to interpret by the experts, and my guesses might be wildly wrong. What I’m hoping to do here is to get you thinking about what you’re seeing, and to understand that we’ve never seen a comet’s surface in detail like this before. Ever.


There’s a huge amount to learn, and it’s essentially all virgin territory, all alien and bizarre. Shakespeare was right: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.


I’ve always interpreted that to mean Nature is more clever than we are, and we will always be surprised by what we find when we explore the Universe… but we’re clever too, and just because we didn’t imagine something a priori doesn’t mean we can’t figure it out a posteriori.


Here are the photos of Nature’s imagination. Now we let the science get to work.






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Let Me Hold You in My Anomalous Arms

It’s been a while since I have slammed your brain with a huge and gorgeous spiral galaxy, so here’s the brain-slamming gorgeous and huge M106:


Oh my.


This mosaic was created by astrophotographer André van der Hoeven, using a combination of images from Hubble, the Canadian-French-Hawaii Telescope, the 1-meter telescope of the Tzec Maun Foundation in Cloudcroft, NM, the Subaru telescope, and an RCOS 51-cm telescope. vd Hoeven lists the details on his Flickr page for the image—and you can grab the ridiculously big 4,626 x 4,152 pixel version there, too.


I suggest you do take a look at that biggest version, because wow. The galaxy itself is incredible. I’ve written about it beforetwice, actually. It’s a spiral about 25 million light years away, more or less in our own neighborhood, and about the same size (or somewhat bigger) than our own Milky Way. At its core is a monster black hole 30 million times the mass of our Sun. It’s actively gobbling down matter, and, as it happens, black holes are messy eaters.


As the matter falls in it gets ferociously hot, and all that energy powers two beams of matter and energy that blasts out from the black hole in opposite directions. Those beams slam into matter in the galaxy, heating it and causing it to glow: That’s why you see those weird red spiral arms that don’t align with the arms of the galaxy itself (which is why they’re called “anomalous arms”). That’s material that’s essentially being cooked by the energy from the black hole. If there are any planets orbiting stars there, I wouldn’t be too interested in investing in them for real estate. Lethal doses of X-rays tend to lower market resale value.


You don’t even have to look at M106 to be in awe of this pictures either; scan around the background and you’ll see hundreds of galaxies, far, far away, some are hundreds of millions or even billions of light years distant.


I’m seeing more images like this all the time; a lot of astronomical data are public, and if you know what you’re doing you can combine them from vastly different telescopes to create amazing shots. But there’s science in here, and a lot of it! Astronomers can study specific parts of a galaxy, but putting them in context can reveal wonders as well. Objects in the galaxy that are too small to see in wide field images can sculpt structures on much larger scales, so putting them together can give us insight into events and connections that might otherwise be unnoticed.


Making the invisible visible is one of the things astronomy does best. And when it does, you can see beauty you didn’t even know existed.






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2015年2月15日 星期日

Two Hours Before Neptune



Two hours before closest approach to Neptune in 1989, the Voyager 2 robot spacecraft snapped this picture. Clearly visible for the first time were long light-colored cirrus-type clouds floating high in Neptune's atmosphere. Shadows of these clouds can even be seen on lower cloud decks. Most of Neptune's atmosphere is made of hydrogen and helium, which is invisible. Neptune's blue color therefore comes from smaller amounts of atmospheric methane, which preferentially absorbs red light. Neptune has the fastest winds in the Solar System, with gusts reaching 2000 kilometers per hour. Speculation holds that diamonds may be created in the dense hot conditions that exist under the cloud tops of Uranus and Neptune. Twenty-six years later, NASA's New Horizons is poised to be the first spacecraft to zoom past Pluto this July. via NASA http://ift.tt/1A9qmkJ

2015年2月14日 星期六

Solar System Portrait



On another Valentine's Day 25 years ago, cruising four billion miles from the Sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back one last time to make this first ever Solar System family portrait. The complete portrait is a 60 frame mosaic made from a vantage point 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. In it, Voyager's wide angle camera frames sweep through the inner Solar System at the left, linking up with gas giant Neptune, the Solar System's outermost planet, at the far right. Positions for Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are indicated by letters, while the Sun is the bright spot near the center of the circle of frames. The inset frames for each of the planets are from Voyager's narrow field camera. Unseen in the portrait are Mercury, too close to the Sun to be detected, and Mars, unfortunately hidden by sunlight scattered in the camera's optical system. Closer to the Sun than Neptune at the time, small, faint Pluto's position was not covered. via NASA http://ift.tt/1DQ6S7v

Crash Course Astronomy Episode 5: Eclipses

I have friends who tell me that seeing a total solar eclipse is literally life-changing; the serene beauty and majestic clockwork motion of the cosmos unfolding above you is transformative, showing you viscerally the connection between you and other objects in the Universe.


I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen one.


But that won’t stop me from talking about them! So, just for you, here is ten minutes of me expositing on eclipses both solar and lunar in Crash Course Astronomy Episode 5:


In the video I mention you can get safe solar viewing glasses online; you can order them from Astronomers Without Borders and from Rainbow Symphony (I have these myself, and I believe that’s what I was wearing in the video). Rainbow Symphony has a wide range of other viewing apparatus as well.


And what I said is the truth: I’ve never seen a total solar eclipse for myself. I’ve seen lots of partial ones, but it’s not the same. I think my best chance will be in 2017, when the path of totality crosses the United States, cutting through a lot of places where the weather will almost certainly be good for viewing. It goes through Wyoming, just a few hundred kilometers north of my house, and that may be where I sojourn to see it.


You’ll be hearing a lot more about the 2017 eclipse in the coming couple of years. Make sure you bookmark this Crash Course Astronomy video so you can watch it again when the time comes!






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2015年2月13日 星期五

Aurora on Ice



Not from a snowglobe, this expansive fisheye view of ice and sky was captured on February 1, from Jökulsárlón Beach, southeast Iceland, planet Earth. Chunks of glacial ice on the black sand beach glisten in the light of a nearly full moon surrounded by a shining halo. The 22 degree lunar halo itself is created by ice crystals in high, thin clouds refracting the moonlight. Despite the bright moonlight, curtains of aurora still dance through the surreal scene. In early February, their activity was triggered by Earth's restless magnetosphere and the energetic wind from a coronal hole near the Sun's south pole. Bright Jupiter, also near opposition, is visible at the left, beyond the icy lunar halo. via NASA http://ift.tt/1B4UFfv

Move Along. This Is Not The Space Policy You're Looking For.

We're only a few days away from the "Pioneering Space National Summit" here in Washington DC - an event only a hundred or so space people will attend. Yet the semi-revealed organizers of this event seem to think that they...



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A Fresh Approach to Fundraising

We want you to know that we’ve been listening to you. Members have highlighted the number of fundraising appeals from The Society, and we agree that the number of requests should be streamlined.



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Media Invited to Boeing Commercial Crew Access Tower Groundbreaking

Boeing and United Launch Alliance (ULA) will mark the start of construction of the Commercial Crew access tower at Space Launch Complex 41(SLC-41) on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida at 2:30 p.m. EST Friday, Feb. 20. Media are invited to tour operations and attend the formal groundbreaking event.



February 13, 2015

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An active comet, from a distance

Rosetta has closed to within 50 kilometers of Churyumov-Gerasimenko, on its way to a very close, 6-kilometer flyby of the comet tomorrow. To prepare for the flyby, Rosetta traveled much farther away, allowing it to snap these amazing photos of an increasingly active comet from a great distance.



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Growing Deltas in Atchafalaya Bay



The delta plain of the Mississippi River is disappearing. The lobe-shaped arc of coastal land from the Chandeleur Islands in eastern Louisiana to the Sabine River loses a football field’s worth of land every hour. Put another way, the delta has shrunk by nearly 5,000 square kilometers (2,000 square miles) over the past 80 years. That’s as if most of Delaware had sunk into the sea. Though land losses are widely distributed across the 300 kilometer (200 mile) wide coastal plain of Louisiana, Atchafalaya Bay stands as a notable exception. In a swampy area south of Morgan City, new land is forming at the mouths of the Wax Lake Outlet and the Atchafalaya River. Wax Lake Outlet is an artificial channel that diverts some of the river’s flow into the bay about 16 kilometers (10 miles) west of where the main river empties. Both deltas are being built by sediment carried by the Atchafalaya River. The Atchafalaya is a distributary of the Mississippi River, connecting to the “Big Muddy” in south central Louisiana near Simmesport. Studies of the geologic history of the meandering Mississippi have shown that—if left to nature—most of the river’s water would eventually flow down the Atchafalaya. But the Old River Control Structure, built in the 1960s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ensures that only 30 percent of the Mississippi flows into the Atchafalaya River, while the rest of the keeps moving toward Baton Rouge and New Orleans. More information. Image Credit: NASA/Earth Observatory via NASA http://ift.tt/1D4iXai

2015年2月12日 星期四

Exploring the Antennae



Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies are colliding. The stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, very rarely collide in the course of the ponderous cataclysm, lasting hundreds of millions of years. But their large clouds of molecular gas and dust often do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. Spanning about 500 thousand light-years, this stunning composited view also reveals new star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational tidal forces. The remarkable collaborative image is a mosaic constructed using data from small and large ground-based telescopes to bring out large-scale and faint tidal streams, composited with the bright cores imaged in extreme detail by the Hubble Space Telescope. Of course, the suggestive visual appearance of the extended arcing structures gives the galaxy pair its popular name - The Antennae. via NASA http://ift.tt/1F0oGhN

Cassini begins a year of icy moon encounters with a flyby of Rhea

At last! Cassini is orbiting in Saturn's ring plane again. I do enjoy the dramatic photographs of Saturn's open ring system that Cassini can get from an inclined orbit, and we won't be getting those again for another year. But with an orbit close to the ring plane, Cassini can repeatedly encounter Saturn's icy moons, and icy moon flybys are my favorite thing about the Cassini mission.



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NASA Study Finds Carbon Emissions Could Dramatically Increase Risk of U.S. Megadroughts

Droughts in the U.S. Southwest and Central Plains during the last half of this century could be drier and longer than drought conditions seen in those regions in the last 1,000 years, according to a new NASA study.



February 12, 2015

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Hearing: Problems With U.S. Weather Satellites

Hearing: Weather Satellite Delays, Data Gap to Harm U.S. Forecasting (with testimony links) "Today, the Subcommittees on Oversight and Environment held a joint hearing to examine schedule delays to our nation's next generation weather forecasting satellites and the implications of...



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NASA TV Previews and Broadcasts Space Station U.S. Spacewalks

Two NASA astronauts from the International Space Station’s Expedition 42 crew will venture outside the orbital complex on Friday, Feb. 20; Tuesday, Feb. 24; and Sunday, March 1. They will prepare cables and communications gear for new docking ports that will allow future crews launched from Florida on U.S. commercial spacecraft to dock to the space station.



February 12, 2015

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In Pictures: DSCOVR Headed for Deep Space

On Wednesday evening, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocketed into orbit with DSCOVR, the Deep Space Climate Observatory. Here's a photo and video roundup.



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NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy



NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) enters the Lufthansa Technik hangar in Hamburg, Germany for its decadal inspection. Flight, aircraft maintenance, and science personnel from the Armstrong Flight Research Center worked alongside Lufthansa's 747 specialists to perform a wide range of inspections and maintenance. Image Credit: NASA/ Jeff Doughty via NASA http://ift.tt/1Mg5TkH

A Seagull Flies on a Dusty Ion Wind

Robert Gendler is an astrophotography whose work I’ve featured here many times (he helped assemble a jaw-dropping Hubble Andromeda Galaxy picture, for example). One area in which he excels is taking data from multiple big telescopes and merging them to create new views of the heavens.


His latest is a stunner: the aptly-named Seagull Nebula:


Can you see the shape of a gull in that? The head is the knot of gas to the left, and the wing shape is obvious enough. In this photo it actually looks more like a parrot to me, but that’s OK. A bird in the hand…


This is actually a vast star-forming region, a huge factory of gas and dust that is collapsing in various places to create newborn stars. Many of these stars are massive and hot, shining blue. They heat the gas up, exciting it (as we say in astronomy); the cloud is mostly hydrogen, which glows a characteristic pinkish-red when flooded by this starlight.


There’s also quite a bit of dark dust in this cloud, opaque to visible light. But the stars are so bright their light can reflect off it, and you see blue fuzz. The head of the gull is a lovely combination of both emission (red) and reflection (blue) nebulae.


Some features of the nebulae were puzzling me, so I poked around to look for other images, and found this one taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Explorer (WISE):


The overall shape is the same, but there are big differences. This image is taken in the far-infrared, where the normally opaque dust glows. It’s actually a bit tough to match up features, since stars that are cool and faint in Gendler’s photo blaze away in the WISE image (and the WISE image is rotated clockwise slightly compared to the visible light image). Worse, what’s dark in Gendler’s image is bright in the WISE image, but some places are bright in both.


But note the bright blue star (called vdB 95) in the top image, located near the center bottom; it’s the brightest star in the field. See the fuzzy ring directly around it? I thought that was a reflection from inside the telescope (which is what causes the larger, sharper but fainter blue halo around it). It turns out that ring is real! You can see it in the WISE image, as well as a red arc. I suspect that star is moving at high speed through the gas and dust, and also blowing off a wind of material (like the Sun’s solar wind). That commonly causes such arc-like features in WISE images. Phenomenal.


Comparing the two, you can see other regions where stars are buried in gas and dust, and therefore are probably very young, still ensconced in their birth cocoons of material. As those stars age, their winds of subatomic particles and ultraviolet light will eat away at the dust, blowing it out, creating cavities in the nebula. Eventually the stars will wander out and travel the galaxy on their own. Thinking of them as chicks leaving the nest seems apropos for the whole theme here.


It’s possible our Sun was born in a cloud like this, our siblings and the nursery long since gone. I love soaking in the beauty of objects like this, but it’s hard not to stop and wonder that once, eons ago, we too were literally part of something like this.






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2015年2月11日 星期三

M100: A Grand Design Spiral Galaxy



Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. It is a large galaxy of over 100 billion stars with well-defined spiral arms that is similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy. One of the brightest members of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, M100 (alias NGC 4321) is 56 million light-years distant toward the constellation of Berenice's Hair (Coma Berenices). This Hubble Space Telescope image of M100 was made in 2009 and reveals bright blue star clusters and intricate winding dust lanes which are hallmarks of this class of galaxies. Studies of variable stars in M100 have played an important role in determining the size and age of the Universe. If you know exactly where to look, you can find a small spot that is a light echo from a bright supernova that was recorded a few years before the image was taken. via NASA http://ift.tt/1vixXcG

Europe's Experimental Spaceplane Completes Successful Test Flight

The IXV spaceplane, designed to demonstrate reentry technologies, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean this morning after a successful, 100-minute test flight.



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Giant Filament Seen on the Sun



A dark, snaking line across the lower half of the sun in this Feb. 10, 2015 image from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a filament of solar material hovering above the sun's surface. SDO shows colder material as dark and hotter material as light, so the line is, in fact, an enormous swatch of colder material hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona. Stretched out, that line – or solar filament as scientists call it – would be more than 533,000 miles long. That is longer than 67 Earths lined up in a row. Filaments can float sedately for days before disappearing. Sometimes they also erupt out into space, releasing solar material in a shower that either rains back down or escapes out into space, becoming a moving cloud known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME. SDO captured images of the filament in numerous wavelengths, each of which helps highlight material of different temperatures on the sun. By looking at such features in different wavelengths and temperatures, scientists learn more about what causes these structures, as well as what catalyzes their occasional eruptions. Launched on Feb. 11, 2010 aboard a ULA Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is designed to study the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth. The spacecraft's long-term measurements give solar scientists in-depth information to help characterize the interior of the sun, the sun's magnetic field, the hot plasma of the solar corona, and the density of radiation that creates the ionosphere of the planets. The information is used to create better forecasts of space weather needed to protect aircraft, satellites and astronauts living and working in space. Image Credit: NASA/SDO via NASA http://ift.tt/1EYkgIf

Faces in the Sky

What does an accomplished astrophotographer do when it’s cloudy for over two months in a row, and getting new photos of the night sky is impossible?


Why, play with pictures already taken, of course. But J-P Metsävainio did more than that: Looking through his amazing collection of gorgeous astronomical photos he’s taken over the years, he started seeing familiar objects in the nebulae, galaxies, and other cosmic objects. With time on his hands, he created a really, really funny gallery of cosmic pareidolia; things that look like other things.


As they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words. The photo at the top of this post is a great example of seeing faces in objects (that's part of the Veil Nebula, the expanding debris from a supernova, and it's several light years across), but I have to admit, Metsävainio is on to something with this shot of the Red Ghost (aka IC 63):


Some of his examples are well-known, like the Pelican, the Heart, and (seriously) the Pac-Man nebula. But he has a lot of others that took a bit of imagination, but are obvious once you see them. Several made me laugh...


If I had to pick a favorite, I’d go with this one, because I don’t know why but it’s perfect and weird and I never would’ve thought of it myself:


Ha!


This idea of seeing familiar objects in patterns is pretty common in astronomy; we’ve named tons of objects after their remarkable (or even seriously vague) resemblance to other things. Heck, that’s what constellations are! And it does help us remember and discuss them more easily. Of course, pareidolia can go wrong, and often does… but sometimes it also goes very, very right.


So take a look at Metsävainio’s gallery, and after that bit of fun, treat yourself and take a look at the collection of images he took in 2014. They may not all look like other things, but they all do look like is gorgeous.


… and one more thing. When you’re done there, prepare to have your brain melted with his 3D rotating image of the nebula IC 1396. You’re welcome.






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