2015年12月31日 星期四
Solstice Sun at Lulworth Cove
NASA: We're on a #JourneyToMars - But Don't Ask Us How
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Planetary Exploration Timelines: A Look Ahead to 2016
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News Conference Features Next Space Station Crew; Interviews Available
December 30, 2015
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ISS Daily Summary Report – 12/30/15
December 30, 2015 at 10:27PM
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The Top Space and Astronomy Stories of 2015
I swear I wasn’t going to do a “Top Whatevers of 2015” blog post this year, but then the Benevolent Overlords at Slate asked me to do one, and what choice do I have? They’re benevolent, but they are overlords. Plus I like them. So we went through the most fun stories of the year, and put them together in video form for your eyeballs. Enjoy.
(Note: I’ve added the transcript below the video, fully endowed with links so you can find more information and reminisce over the past annum.)
TRANSCRIPT:
Every year seems to be a big year in space and astronomy, with new missions, amazing images, and wonderful science.
2015 was no exception … but it was specifically planetary science that stole the spotlight. The biggest news was the flyby of Pluto after a decadelong voyage by the New Horizons spacecraft, which sent back the first close-up pictures in human history of the tiny, frozen world. It turns out Pluto is surprisingly diverse, with vast, flat plains of frozen nitrogen, towering mountains of water ice rivaling the Rockies, and weird fields of pits caused by evaporating ice. It even has a sprawling flat area that looks like a heart!
Pluto’s large moon Charon held its own, too. It’s a ragged mess, like someone tore it apart and then slapped it back together again. The southern hemisphere is smoother, the northern more ragged, and there’s a dark red splotch at the north pole forbiddingly named Mordor. The coloration may be due to chemicals from Pluto that leaked away from its thin atmosphere and fell on Charon.
Speaking of Pluto’s atmosphere, it has one. It’s very thin, but it’s mostly nitrogen, like Earth’s. And also like Earth, there’s enough there to scatter sunlight—and that means if you were on Pluto you’d see blue skies! But don’t bother with sunscreen. From 5 billion kilometers away, frost bite is a far bigger concern than sunburn.
In 2015, the Dawn spacecraft arrived at the protoplanet Ceres, the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and immediately “spotted” a mystery: Over a hundred bright spots on the surface, including a pair in the middle of a large crater that dominates the photos.
Speculation on the Internet ran freely, from ice deposits to—of course—alien bases. But further analysis of the spots shows they’re likely to be salt deposits, left over from briny water ice seeping up from the interior of Ceres. This was unexpected on the surface of the airless world and shows that the solar system still has lots of surprises for us.
Comets made the news, too: The Rosetta spacecraft went into orbit around the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, but the highest resolution images didn’t start rolling in until January 2015. They revealed a bizarre, forbidding place, with jagged cliffs, deep fissures, and sinkholes venting gas. A study of the layers of materials on the comet revealed how it got its rubber-ducky shape, too: It used to be two comets! A gentle collision stuck them together like two snowballs, forming the weird lumpy worldlet we see now.
Even more, scientists were able to receive a signal from Philae, the plucky robot lander that was thought lost when it hit the comet and failed to stick the landing. It fell to rest on its side and was silent for months until we heard back from it once again in June. The signal’s been intermittent, but scientists remain hopeful they can regain contact with it and find out more about the comet from up close.
Weirdly, just as much in the news as science stuff that did happen was stuff that … didn’t happen.
The Kepler space observatory stares at 150,000 stars, looking for changes in their brightness as potential planets pass in front of them. One such star, KIC 8462852, was acting really, really weirdly. Instead a single dip in brightness like you’d expect from a planet, it had hundreds of dips. They seemed to come at random times, and some blocked an incredible 20 percent of the starlight. No planet could do that! So what was causing it?
One possibility—extremely unlikely, but possible—was that an advanced alien civilization was building gigantic structures around the star. Now, astronomers had lots of other explanations, but nothing seemed to quite fit, and it wasn’t much effort to check, so why not? Various telescopes and methods were deployed to see if aliens might be sending a signal our way, but no luck. The most likely explanation is a gigantic comet disrupted, creating millions of small chunks and huge clouds of gas that are blocking the star’s light.
That’s still pretty cool, but a tiny piece of me still hopes that maybe hailing frequencies are still open.
Another thing that didn’t happen in 2015 was that Mark Watney didn’t really get stuck on Mars. Well, that did happen, but only in the blockbuster movie The Martian. And while it was science fiction, a lot of it was rooted in what we really do know about Mars. NASA had a pretty big hand in developing and promoting the movie, which is why the technology looks so familiar. I can nitpick the details of the science in the movie—and I have—but I can’t argue the overall theme of the flick: Science and good ol’ human knowhow can overcome a lot of life’s obstacles … even what that obstacle is 100 million kilometers of empty space.
Rockets had an interesting year, too. Blue Origin, the rocket company owned by Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, successfully launched an uncrewed suborbital rocket into space and then brought it back down to land vertically on Earth once again—a successful step on the path to future flights.
For the private rocket company SpaceX, 2015 had some pretty big ups and downs. In June, an attempted launch of a Falcon 9 carrying supplies to the space station resulted in complete catastrophe as a loose strut inside the rocket resulted in a tank of liquid helium rupturing, causing a complete loss of the mission. Still, SpaceX got an order from NASA to launch astronauts to the space station in 2017. They also made space history in late December when the booster for a Falcon 9 rocket was successfully relanded at Cape Canaveral after helping loft a series of satellites into space. The first stage booster landed vertically in a pitch-perfect mission that will hopefully lead the way to more reliable and less expensive access to space.
And Elon Musk, the flamboyant SpaceX CEO, made some headlines after saying he wanted to nuke the poles of Mars to create a thicker atmosphere on the planet, a prelude to colonizing it. I have my doubts that would work, but at least he’s not thinking small.
But Musk was also involved in the biggest news of all, a cover-up so huge it spans decades: It turns out the Simpsons’ home town of Springfield isn’t even in the United States! An episode of the venerable cartoon series featuring Musk showed him looking out a window after dinner and seeing the crescent Moon, but the crescent was facing the wrong way! That would only work if Springfield were in the Southern Hemisphere, putting lie to 26 years of TV. Unless Musk has been able to flip the Earth upside down, somehow. I wouldn’t put it past him.
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2015年12月30日 星期三
The Fox Fur Nebula
Preview: 2016 aboard the International Space Station
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The Alps in Winter
Oregon Transplant
Years ago, my wife and I were thinking of moving out of California. We decided to travel around a bit over time and see what caught our fancy. One destination we loved was Oregon; it was beautiful, the people where we visited were friendly, and it just felt like a place we could call home.
Ultimately, we decided Colorado was a better fit for us, and I’ve never regretted that decision. But Oregon is still a mighty pretty place. And I can prove it to you too:
Holy wow. Gorgeous! I like the mix of time-lapse and slow-motion photography; both show us the world in different ways, exposing sights and events our eyes and brains aren’t adapted to seeing on their own.
I have to laugh, too: I saw the name of the video production company, Uncage the Soul, and it sounded familiar. I checked, and hey! One of the guys running it is Ben Canales, a photographer whose work I’ve featured here on the blog many times. He took one of my favorite astrophotos of all time:
I love that so much. As I wrote about it, “This is what it’s like to live in my head.”
I’m really glad I got to feature more of Ben’s work here. If you want to see more — and you do — then check out his 500px page. He’s really very gifted.
Some day I’ll head back to Oregon. I gave a talk in Portland a few years ago and really enjoyed myself, and Crater Lake… well, that ancient exploded volcano still deeply resonates in my brain and heart. It was overwhelming, and I’d love the chance to experience it again.
Tip o’ the lens cap to Vernon Balbert.
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2015年12月29日 星期二
Dust of the Orion Nebula
ULA Vs SpaceX: Just Bring More Money
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Two epic photos of Earth -- but which one is truer?
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Remembering Fred Durant, George Mueller, and Bob Farquhar
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Reading the Alphabet From Space
Importance of CRISPR Surpasses Pluto Ballot Stuffing Effort
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Dione, From Afar
As the year winds down, can we take a moment to remember how beautiful our Universe can be? Especially our little local piece of it.
That image above was taken by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since—and I still have a hard time believing this—2004. In more than a decade it has taken countless observations of Saturn, its atmosphere, the rings, and its ridiculously photogenic moons.
The photo shows Dione, a mostly-ice-but-with-some-rock moon, some 1,120 kilometers across (our Moon is roughly three times that diameter). One hemisphere of the moon contains the wispy features you can see in the shot; they were discovered during the Voyager probes in the early 1980s. From those images they were thought to be material extruded from beneath the surface, but Cassini revealed them to be fractures in the surface, interconnecting canyons with bright walls, probably made of nearly pure water ice.
From 1.7 million kilometers away, Cassini got an interesting overview of the moon, with the wisps and a few large craters visible. Highlighting the shot are Saturn’s rings, seen very nearly edge-on, behind the moon. Cassini was “below” the rings, south of Saturn’s equator, looking “up” (north), in this shot; you can tell because the rings look dark gray. Right now it’s approaching summer in Saturn’s northern hemisphere (the solstice for Saturn is in May 2017), so the Sun shines down from the north on the rings. If Cassini were north of Saturn’s equator, the rings would look far brighter as the tiny ice particles reflect sunlight toward the spacecraft.
This image was taken on Aug. 15, 2015, just two days before Cassini flew past Dione, dipping down to an astonishing 500 km of its surface, and sending back pictures so incredible they almost stopped my heart. That was the very last flyby of Dione; there are no more scheduled between now and the time the Cassini mission ends in 2017.
That’s going to be a tough one, I’ll admit. Cassini has been nothing short of a triumph, a phenomenal paean to what humans can do when we look up to the sky in wonder instead of at each other in hatred. It is the best of us, and has shown us how devastatingly beautiful, how intricately woven, and how magnificently displayed are the results of nature’s laws.
I have friends who have worked on Cassini for decades. It will be incredibly sad to see it end, fittingly plunging into the atmosphere of Saturn. There are no plans by any nation to visit Saturn again … but we have a Europa mission on the boards, and I hope, with recent news of a healthy increase to NASA’s budget, that we may venture this way again, and learn more about the giants that populate the outer solar system. Even after all this time, there is still a Universe worth of knowledge to gain out there.
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ISS Daily Summary Report – 12/28/15
December 28, 2015 at 10:38PM
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2015年12月28日 星期一
Putin Formally Kills Roscosmos
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All That Wacky Secret Stuff That NASA Supposedly Does
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ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and Schiaparelli lander travel safely to Baikonur
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NASA and Artificial Intelligence
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Boulders on a Martian Landslide
SpaceX Releases New Photos of the Booster Landing
On Dec. 22, 2015, the private rocket company SpaceX performed an extraordinary feat: returning the first stage booster of an orbital rocket back to ground, landing vertically on its tail, right in the center of the landing pad.
The video is incredible, and now SpaceX has released lovely high-res photos of the event as well. I want you these pictures here because a) they’re very cool, and 2) there’s a point I want to make at the end. Also, click on the pictures to make them full size; I had to crop them a bit to fit here. They’re worth it.
Moments before landing, the booster comes in at a slight angle from vertical. Onboard software senses the orientation of the booster (as well as wind speed and other factors) and corrects for it to ensure it lands vertically. Note the landing legs, deployed earlier, after the booster separated from the rest of the rocket, sticking out the bottom at an angle.
A second or two later the booster has reoriented itself, and is very near vertical, ready to land. The rocket exhaust is hitting the ground and billowing out.
From a remotely controlled drone, the view is even more dramatic. As you can see, the booster is almost exactly centered over the stylized X (the SpaceX logo, but also a convenient way to mark a spot. Say).
Speaking of which, here is Landing Zone 1 before the booster landed. Note the person standing in the middle, arms wide (hopefully more as a “Look at this!” expression more than “I got it! I got it!”). This should give you a sense of scale…
Now look at the booster sitting on the pad. The whole time it was landing, and even looking at these photos, I had a hard time grasping the scale of what I was seeing, even though not long ago I stood right next to one of the landing legs and saw the size of the boosters when I visited the SpaceX factory earlier this year.
Note the person in an orange jacket crouched over by the landing leg on the left. The booster is far bigger than you think! It stands over 40 meters in height, as tall as a 12 story building, and even empty weighs something like 20 tons.
Got that? So this is what SpaceX did: They took a 12 story rocket weighing 20,000 kilograms moving at 6000 kph, slowed it, stopped it, turned it around, let it fall nearly 200 km to the ground, reignited the engines, had it follow a descent path, automatically correcting its orientation and attitude, until it landed within a few meters of the pre-chosen spot.
That is (in part) why I was excited about this feat: It was an astonishingly complex technological process, and they nailed it. And now the booster will be checked out to see how it faired during all this. It may get cleaned up to be reused, though in a press conference after the launch Musk noted they may keep this one in their factory, a memento to the achievement.
So as I pointed out in my original article, the story is not yet done. This was the first step; getting the booster back on the ground. The next step, the critical one, is to reuse the booster (or whichever one is brought back down to the ground next). Once that has been achieved, then Elon Musk and SpaceX will have shown they can reuse that rocket, and potentially save tens of millions of dollars on a launch into orbit.
Musk estimates the cost to build a first stage Falcon 9 at around $60 million, while the fuel costs around $200,000. If they can reuse that booster, then even if it costs a few million bucks to fix it back up, that’s a savings of over $50 million in launch costs… on a launch that costs roughly $90 million to start with.
If this works, then launch costs can be cut in half. And that is the second part of why I was so excited about this landing. I hope this all works. Between this effort, Blue Origin’s recent flight into space and back, NASA’s Orion capsule, Boeing’s CST-100 capsule, Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser, and Virgin Galactic (despite the awful loss of their SpaceShipTwo in 2014), we are in an unprecedented moment: More human-rated spaceships are in development now than in any time since the Space Age began.
Where will we be in 20 years? I can’t say for sure, but if everything goes well, more humans will be space than in all of history. That is a future I very much look forward to.
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2015年12月27日 星期日
Doomed Star Eta Carinae
CineSpace
Well now, this is lovely: NASA and the Houston Cinema Arts Society teamed up to form the CineSpace competition. The idea was to take some real NASA imagery and create a short film that uses it in some way.
They just announced the winners, and I watched several of them. They’re all quite good, including the overall winner, “Higher Ground” (holy mackerel, the effort that went into that!). But I think my favorite is “Home”, which is very short:
I love how it uses the everyday things we experience and weaves them into the things NASA does every day… and then projects that into the future.
Also, I’m a sucker for a composite shot of someone standing in awe, looking up, gawking at some fantastic scene in the sky. It reminds me a little bit of “Wanderers” — which, in my opinion, is the best short paean to space travel ever made.
Still, I recommend bookmarking that NASA page and watching the videos when you get a chance. It’s always interesting to see how different people interpret very general instructions like this, and the results will show you just how inspiring NASA and space exploration can be.
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2015年12月26日 星期六
Southern Craters and Galaxies
Stormscapes3
Nicolaus Wegner is a photographer and a storm chaser, and he’s well accomplished at both. His time-lapse video Stormscapes is wonderful, as is Stormscapes2.
He’s just released Stormscapes3, and wow. I mean seriously, WOW. Make this full screen, turn up the volume, and watch the whole thing, because at four minutes in it gets pretty jaw-dropping. A note: If bright strobe-like flashes bug you, then have a care because there’s a lot of that in the latter part of the video.
I love how the serene music at the beginning contrasts with the nuclear-bomb amounts of energy being casually tossed around by convection in those storms. And the colors! As I mentioned in Monsoon II (and the other Stormscape video posts linked above), the cause of the deep blues and greens you see in some of those storm clouds isn’t terribly well understood; they may be from light passing through icy hailstones.
Wegner told me that he shot a lot of this near Limon, Colorado, 150 or so km southeast of where I live. He’s tried to convince me to head out that way in the spring to catch some of these wild storms. I prefer to stay away from violent weather if I can (unless it comes to me), but watching his videos makes it very, very tempting.
Earlier this summer my wife and I saw a deep green cloud north of us, and it dumped a lot of rain in a short time. I wasn’t able to get pictures (we were driving) but it was still amazing. But oh, I’d so love to see a majestically spinning mesocyclone for myself, maybe from 50 km away so the whole thing could be taken in at once.
With the El Niño we have brewing in the Pacific, maybe this coming year I’ll get my chance.
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2015年12月25日 星期五
Merry Goatsmas!
During this holiday season, remember what’s truly important: Ridiculously cute goat elf cosplay.
The goats seem to be getting used to the snow, which is good because we’re expecting a bit today again*. Maybe I’ll find Tauntaun costumes for them…
Whatever your beliefs, or lack thereof, have a great holiday. And now you will, because goats.
* And before anyone calls PETA on me, they all slip in the snow, cosplaying or not. As I mention in the video notes, they’re amazing jumpers and climbers, but really awkward when they don’t stick the landing.
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2015年12月24日 星期四
Star Colors and Pinyon Pine
Pretty Pictures of the Cosmos: Distant Galaxies
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Stained Glass Pluto
This is pretty amazing: An actual movie taken by a camera on board the New Horizons spacecraft as it passed by Pluto in July! But it’s not your ordinary movie… it’s actually taking a spectrum of Pluto, mapping out minerals on its surface as the world sweeps by underneath. The spectrum is in the infrared, light invisible to our eyes, but it’s been converted to colors our eyes can see to produce this trippy and very cool video:
So what the heck did you just see? First, let me link to Alex Parker's writeup of this; Parker created the video and gives loads of details. But I can't resist explaining it myself; it's too much fun not to.
The detector used to make this is called LEISA, for Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array. It’s a small 256 x 256 pixel detector, and it’s equipped with a very weird filter. Usually, filters are flat and let through a very specific wavelength, or color, of light.
But LEISA has a wedge filter, and this means that different wavelengths are let through at different positions on the filter. In this case, you get slices of color, so the "bluest" (shortest wavelength) light gets through on one side of the filter, the "reddest" (longest wavelength) at the other, with a gradual series of steps in between. That’s why you see those vertical slices of color: Each is one of 256 individual slices of color the filter lets through.
In this case, the light is infrared, with 1.25 micron light on the left and 2.5 microns on the right. The human eye can see out to about .75 microns or so, so this IR light is invisible to us, but many minerals can be identified by how much of these colors of light they reflect and absorb. These include water ice, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and methane.
As the spacecraft moved past Pluto, the tiny icy world swept past the detector. The detector is set up to take images at the same speed Pluto moved past, in a sense taking 256 pictures that could then be split up and reassembled to map the surface in all 256 colors.
I know, that’s weird. Imagine it this way: Let’s say you have a single column of pixels that only lets through light at 1.25 microns. As the detector sees the edge of Pluto it takes a snapshot (creating a single line of data). Then a moment later, it takes another, then another, and so on. Eventually, you have 256 slices of Pluto that will all fit together to make a picture of it.
This is called the pushbroom technique. But why stop with one row of pixels? If you have two, each seeing different colors, you can make two color images at the same time. Or 3, or 4… or 256. That’s how this works.
In the video, the colors were shifted in wavelength, converted, to blue through red so our eyes can interpret them. Watch it again, and keep your eyes on some particular feature on Pluto’s surface; say, a dark spot. As it moves across the detector, you may see it get brighter and darker. That’s because different minerals (say, water ice versus methane ice) reflect and absorb different colors differently. So one might be very bright in “blue” but very dark in “green”.
The dark vertical streaks correspond to colors where some minerals absorb light. Not as much light from the Sun gets reflected, so that part of the image looks darker. Really strong ones correspond to nitrogen and methane ice, which are abundant on the surface.
It’s interesting how the surface seems very high contrast in the “purple”, and you can see lots of bright and dark features. Clearly, there are some minerals on the surface of Pluto that strongly absorb the infrared light that’s displayed as purple in the video, while others don’t, giving them high contrast (the orange section on the right is a special case; it covers a narrower part of the spectrum at higher color resolution; this part is sensitive to nitrogen, and is used to map temperature and composition variations with more detail).
Also, you can see Pluto moving slightly up and down, bobbing, as it moves across the view. That’s actually due to the New Horizons thrusters firing as it flew by! The individual snapshots were taken about every half-second to create this video, so you’re seeing things sped up, but still, that’s very cool.
As a final note, a reminder that this movie was assembled by Alex Parker, who does simply amazing work with Pluto images. Follow him on Twitter. Trust me: He will drop a bit of true wonder into your timeline every now and again, and your life will be better for it.
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ISS Daily Summary Report – 12/23/15
December 24, 2015 at 12:36AM
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Wham! Apollo 16 Saturn V Booster Impact Site Found on the Moon
In the last 1960s and early 1970s, NASA sent a dozen men to the Moon and returned them safely to Earth. Apollo started as a political stunt, a way for America to thumb its nose at the USSR. But along the way, a remarkable thing happened: Science.
We learned a lot about the Moon during those missions. And the engineers and scientists at NASA figured out clever ways of learning more: Seismographs were placed on the surface by several missions, starting with Apollo 11 (which only provided data for a few weeks; later devices worked for years). Waiting for moonquakes was a pain, though, so they decided to make their own: Starting with Apollo 13, the upper stage of the Saturn rocket that brought them to the Moon was purposely steered toward the surface. When it impacted, it created a series of seismic waves that could be measured.
Fast forward to 2015. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been mapping the Moon’s surface in detail for years, and over time has found all the impact sites for those boosters, except one: that of Apollo 16. The S-IVB boosters were equipped with radio devices, so they could be tracked to the surface. The impact locations for the others were well known, and relatively easily found in LRO images. But the Apollo 16 transmitter failed, so the location of the impact site was only poorly known…
Until now. The impact crater of the Apollo 16 S-IVB has finally been located! It was about 30 km off from tracking estimates. That may not seem like much, but the LRO images map the Moon in strips 25 or 50 km wide, and those images have half a billion pixels in them. Worse, the Moon is saturated in craters the size of the booster impacts, making this like looking for a particular grain of sand on a huge beach.
But the good folks working with LRO found it. The impact site is in the western half of the Moon in a region called Mare Insularum, just to the southwest of the bright crater Copernicus.
The photo at the top of this article shows the impact crater. It looks different than those around it; the other craters are softer looking, with less distinct features. That’s a clear sign of age, perhaps billions of years; micrometeorite impacts and the solar wind take their toll over the eons.
The impact site also has obvious rays: Streamers of excavated material shot out as plumes, which then fall as linear features pointing away from the center of the crater. Those same erosive events fade the rays over time, so we know this is a very fresh feature. And the size, about 40 x 30 meters (roughly a quarter the area of an American football field), is just what you’d expect from a high-speed impact from the Saturn V booster.
Very cool. And this is more than just idle curiosity: The exact location of the booster impact will help refine the models of the Moon’s interior made using those seismographs. The devices used timing differences to figure out how the seismic waves traveled through the Moon, so knowing the exact location of the sources of the waves is very helpful. The shape and depth of the crater also help scientists understand the nature of impacts on the Moon, too.
We spend a lot of time, effort, and money on Apollo, and here we are, 43 years later, still learning from it. I expect that will be true for many, many decades to come, too.
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Christmas Pluto
2015年12月23日 星期三
Geminid Meteors over Xinglong Observatory
ULA Gets A Russian Christmas Gift From Sen. Shelby
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Zinnia Flowers Starting to Grow on the International Space Station
NASA Suspends 2016 Launch of InSight Mission to Mars
December 22, 2015
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InSight's Problems: Possible Impacts
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NASA Suspends InSight, The Next Big Mission to Mars
Well, not all the space news this week is good: NASA formally suspended the Mars InSight mission. The lander was set to launch in March 2016 for a September 2016 touchdown. Its mission is to study the interior geology of Mars; the name is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations Geodesy and Heat Transport.
The main instrument on the lander, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), is a seismometer designed to study the ground movements of Mars to extraordinary accuracy; literally displacements on the size scale of atoms.
SEIS, built by the French Centre National d'Études Spatiales, needs a very rigorous vacuum seal around its three sensors. During a vacuum test last week, though, a leak was found. Leaks had been found earlier in the year and repaired, but this new leak is too close to the launch date to be sure it can be fixed.
Given that, NASA admins made the hard call: The mission has been suspended for now. During a press conference, Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator, said they don’t think there’s a fundamental design flaw with the instrument, just a stubborn part or parts. It’s possible this can be repaired, and the instrument thoroughly checked again. For now, InSight will be shipped to Lockheed to undergo examination.
Because of the relative motion of Earth and Mars around the Sun, the two planets won’t be in position for another launch for 26 months — that is, until 2018. Here’s where things get sticky: That’s plenty of time to fix the problem, but InSight is a cost-cap mission; there’s a hard upper limit of $675M for the mission including launch, and $525M has already been spent. Because of that, there’s a chance it may be canceled altogether. NASA has not yet run the numbers for that.
This is heartbreaking; the rocket is ready to be assembled, and things were looking good for launch just three months from now. But SEIS is the main instrument on InSight, and NASA won’t launch a mission when there’s a good chance the main device might fail.
It’s tough news right now, but it sounds like it’s the right call. And it may yet work out; the Curiosity rover mission was delayed by two years to give engineers time to work out some unexpected kinks, and I doubt most people even remember that now because the mission has been so ridiculously successful. My big concern is the cost cap, honestly. If it's projected to run out of money, then that may very well be that (unless the Europeans cover the additional costs). Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
For more details, I suggest reading Casey Dreier’s article at The Planetary Society, and, as usual, following Emily Lakdawalla on Twitter.
This stinks, but the story’s not over yet. Stay Tuned.
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ISS Daily Summary Report – 12/22/15
December 23, 2015 at 12:45AM
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2015年12月22日 星期二
For the first time ever, a Curiosity Mastcam self-portrait from Mars
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NASA's Next Mars Mission Delayed for Two Years
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NASA Suspends 2016 Launch of InSight Mission to Mars, Media Teleconference Today
December 22, 2015
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FAA Announces Landing Impact Statement Day After SpaceX Lands
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December solstice: Viewing Earth's seasonal shifts from space
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NASA Will Not Be Launching InSight To Mars in 2016
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NASA Astronaut Tim Kopra on Dec. 21 Spacewalk
Hey! Wanna Be an Astronaut?
Ever dreamed of flying in space, floating by a window in a space station, watching the Earth slide past you at eight kilometers per second? Or maybe riding a Boeing capsule to an asteroid, or a SpaceX rocket to Mars?
Now you have a chance to quite literally make your dream a reality. NASA is hiring astronauts.
NASA is accepting applications for a new class of astronauts. Today, more new human spacecraft are in development in the United States (U.S.) than at any time in history, and future Astronaut Candidates will have the opportunity to explore farther in space than humans have ever been.
Oh, that opening line. I hadn’t really thought of it in those terms, but it’s true. Boeing’s CST-100, SpaceX’s Dragon V2, and NASA’s own Orion capsule — all three are currently under development, and if they all wind up in production it will open a lot of chances to explore space*.
In my life I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a few of the people who have traveled to space. In my experience this most recent generation of astronauts has been comprised of some of the most intelligent, compassionate, driven, kind, and forward-thinking human beings our species has to offer. Set aside any hype, any mythos about them, and you are still left with a group who are a breed apart, an inspiration to what we can do when we strive for the stars.
It’s hard to say what lays ahead for NASA — plans change, governments priorities fluctuate, and random chance always plays its role — but it’s entirely possible that a young man or woman applying to be an astronaut in this round could be the first person to leave a footprint on Mars.
That, I think, is a dream worth trying to make happen.
My thanks to Reid Wiseman for alerting me to this; he knows of which he speaks.
* There are a lot of caveats here, of course, and my feelings about Orion are on record and haven’t changed. But even without it, in just a couple of years the ability available to NASA to launch humans into space will grow enormously.
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ISS Daily Summary Report – 12/21/15
December 22, 2015 at 12:40AM
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NASA Administrator Statement on Japan Announcement of Support for International Space Station Through 2024
December 22, 2015
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2015年12月21日 星期一
What If We Used Reusable Falcon Heavys To Go To Mars?
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SN Refsdal: The First Predicted Supernova Image
SpaceX Sticks the Landing!
Tonight — Dec. 21, 2015, at 13:49 UTC — space history was made. For the first time the first stage of a rocket came back from helping boost a payload to orbit and landed vertically back at the launch site.
The private company SpaceX achieved this incredible milestone. And it was really amazing to watch live (scroll to the 40:20 time mark if the video doesn’t go there automatically):
WOW. I watched this on the SpaceX live feed, and my heart was pounding like a tympani (hearing hundreds of SpaceX employees cheering wildly only added to the suspense). By landing the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket successfully, SpaceX can refurbish it and prepare it for another launch, saving a lot of money on launch costs.
One of the major goals CEO Elon Musk had for SpaceX was to lower launch costs, making it easier to get into space. Today, that goal was achieved. Even sweeter: This was the first Falcon 9 flight after one in June which failed catastrophically, with the entire payload (supplies for the space station) lost.
OK, let me back up a bit. Tonight’s launch had the primary goal of placing 11 ORBCOMM satellites into orbit. The launch was originally set for Dec. 20, but Musk delayed it a day because the weather looked more favorable tonight to re-land the booster.
Liftoff was right on time, 20:33 Eastern time (01:33 UTC). The first stage burn went nominally, and separated cleanly from the upper stage. While the upper stage continues on to carry the satellites into orbit, the first stage — which saved a little bit of fuel from the launch — flipped around and performed a burn to slow down. Without the upper stage, and minus most of the fuel it had at liftoff, it weighed only a fraction of its launch weight, so it didn’t take nearly as much fuel to slow down and reverse course to head back to Cape Canaveral.
Cold jets oriented it correctly, and the engine reignited to begin to slow its descent. Four huge landing struts deployed, then, at T+9:44, the moment of truth: It set down safely at Landing Zone 1, the landing pad that was once a launch site of its own in Florida.
Amazing.
Minutes later, the 11 ORBCOMM satellites were successfully deployed into orbit, and both the primary and secondary goals of the launch were achieved — a complete success. Incidentally, the second stage saved a bit of fuel as well. It was set to perform a burn to de-orbit itself, and will burn up over the Indian Ocean to prevent it from becoming just another piece of space junk to deal with in orbit. When I hear about that I'll update this post.
Let me put this in some perspective. SpaceX has been testing vertical landings for several years time with its Grasshopper rocket series, which reached a maximum height of about a kilometer (0.6 miles) off the ground. Then, in November 2015, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket company successfully sent its New Shepard rocket into space (past the agreed-upon 100-km-high definition of space) and landed it again vertically back at the launch site, the first time that had ever been done.
Tonight, after the SpaceX booster landed again at the Cape, Bezos tweeted:
That’s nice, but also a little unfair. He specifically called the booster “suborbital”, equating it to the New Shepard. However what SpaceX did was far more technically difficult. The New Shepard went straight up and down, with no sideways velocity. The Falcon 9 first stage was moving eastward very rapidly, about 6,000 kph (3,600 mph). It had to slow, come back west, and then land. And mind you, it also successfully boosted the second stage with the payload of 11 satellites as well. What Blue Origin did was fantastic, but nothing like what happened tonight with SpaceX.
I’ll note that after the New Shepard flight, Bezos and Musk exchanged a series of snarky tweets that were funny, but appeared to have more than a bit of competition fueling them as well.
So, what’s next? The Falcon 9 first stage will now be thoroughly checked to see what damage it took and what it will take to clean it up and reuse it. Eventually, this will be a less expensive and faster process than building one from scratch. So in a sense, this test isn’t over: Once a booster is re-used, then it will show that the next step in spaceflight has been truly achieved (much like, in a historical sense, the second flight of the Space Shuttle was just as important as the first).
Nothing is ever routine when it comes to space, so while this was a big step, many more lie ahead. SpaceX has more Falcon 9 launches (and booster landings) scheduled, and will hopefully test its massive Falcon Heavy next year; this is essentially three Falcon 9s strapped together, and will have a higher lift capacity than any other rocket on Earth. It’s designed from the ground up to carry humans into space.
It won’t be human-rated for some time, and in the meantime SpaceX has an order from NASA to send a crew of astronauts to the International Space Station in 2017. Boeing has two orders for crewed launches, using its new CST-100 capsule. It’s unclear who will launch first.
Either way, this is all great news. Two companies are competing to make access to space less expensive and more reliable, and a third, Blue Origin, is making big strides in crewed suborbital launches. It’s been a while — July 21, 2011 — since an American rocket brought humans to space, but the time is soon coming when we’ll be doing it again.
Congratulations to everyone at SpaceX. You earned this.
Postscript: I wrote about Musk, SpaceX, and the goal of putting humans on Mars after a trip to the SpaceX factory earlier this year. That will put this launch into perspective as well.
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Bezos Knocks SpaceX For Something Bezos Has Not Done Yet
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SpaceX Falcon 9 Returns to Flight, Sticks Landing at Cape Canaveral
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SpaceX Lands First Stage Back on Earth
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Background on Tonight's Launch
A lot about how things work in space is counter-intuitive, as all of our intuition is gained from daily experiences where the air is thick, gravity doesn't seem to change and movement is relatively slow. We do see lots of movies about space, but, unless you're watching an IMAX documentary, they vary from slightly wrong, like The Martian (good movie!), to mostly absurdly wrong, like Red Planet (don't watch this, it will hurt your brain), which also doesn't help intuition.
Gravity Never Stops
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Pluto updates from AGU and DPS: Pretty pictures from a confusing world
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NASA Reaches New Heights in 2015
December 21, 2015
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Chandra Finds Remarkable Galactic Ribbon Unfurled
Spacewalkers Unstick Cart ahead of Cargo Ship Arrival
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Something for Everyone: A Solstice, Tonight!
At 04:48 UTC tomorrow morning (or 21:48 tonight Eastern US time), the Earth’s north polar axis will be tipped as far away from the Sun as it will be all year. This means the Sun will reach its most southern position on the sky. It also means we have the day with the least amount of daylight in it*, and the longest night.
In other words, it’s the winter solstice (or, out of respect for southern hemisphereans, the December solstice).
I described this in some detail last year at this time, so if you want more info, check that out.
But, there’s something I want to note: You’d think that if the amount daylight is shortest on the solstice, then you’d have the latest sunrise and earliest sunset, right? But actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
For example, in Boulder, the earliest sunset already happened, sometime around Dec. 8 or so, when it set at 4:36 p.m. But the latest sunrise still hasn’t happened yet: That’ll be around Jan. 4 of next year.
This is true everywhere in the northern hemisphere, though the exact numbers and dates depend on your latitude. But it’s caused by two things: The Earth’s axis is tilted, and the Earth’s orbit isn’t a perfect circle. These two situations interact in an unusual and not necessarily intuitive way, changing the dates of the latest sunrise and earliest sunset by a week or so around the December solstice. I wrote a post describing it a while back, and of you want even more details, go to analemma.com and poke around; that’s a fun website (if you’re an astronomy dork, as — duh — I am).
As it happens, in Boulder on the solstice, it turns out daylight lasts about 9 hours and 20 minutes today. Compare that to the summer (June) solstice when daylight is just over 15 hours! That might seem a little bleak, but think of it this way: Every day, from now until June 20 (the summer/June solstice) the days get a bit longer, and night a bit shorter (get the times for your own location here). That’s why ancient peoples celebrated this day; it meant the worst (as far as least daylight) was behind them.
That sounds like a fine basis for celebration to me! Even though I’m an astronomer, and I like long nights, it’s nice to see the Sun sometimes too.
* Some people say we have the shortest day, but that word is ambiguous; do they mean amount of daylight or the time it takes the Earth to spin once? That’s why I phrased it as I did above. Also? One day/night cycle has the technical name of nycthemeron, a word I love.
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