NASA's Opportunity rover has been tentatively checking out the rim of Victoria Crater, gathering as much science as it can before going down inside. Mission controllers announced today that they've got all the data they need, and they're ready to push the rover over the edge, and send it on a potentially one-way journey down into the crater.
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There's a strange phenomenon on the Moon that has puzzled astronomers for hundreds of years. They're called transient lunar phenomena (TLPs), and they look like a brief flashes, changes in colour, or blurring on the surface of the Moon.
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Have you ever marveled at how large the full Moon looks when it's just peeking up over the horizon? It looks so much larger than when it's high in the sky. It's not changing in size, your brain is tricking you.
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One time, astronomers thought that only black holes had jets of material pouring out of them. Something to do with the event horizon, and a lack of a solid surface. Well, step aside black holes, neutron stars seem to have them too.
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This is a cool photograph taken by ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. It shows the Aeolis Mensae region on Mars, an area known to be on a tectonic transition zone. This might be an explanation for the long linear features and carved valleys.
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Astrosp-here and astro there, astro everywhere.
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Just give you all a warning, I'm going to be moving back to Vancouver, Canada in 2 days, so there might be a few interruptions. I'll try to keep it to a minimum.
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NASA has Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra to cover visible, ultraviolet, infrared and X-ray portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The next wavelength to get its own space telescope is gamma rays. When NASA's Gamma ray Large Area Telescope (GLAST) launches in December, there will be a powerful new observatory in space, capturing more gamma rays than any space observatory to date.
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If you've got a really big rocket, what should you use it for? If you're an astronomer, you'll want it used to launch really big telescopes; observatories that would dwarf the Hubble Space Telescope.
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Supernovae are rare events, only occurring once every 25-100 years in galaxy. So it came as a complete surprise when NASA's Swift satellite turned up two supernovae going off at the same time in a galaxy – separated by only 16 days.
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I'm running out of clever ways to introduce the astrosphere. Uh… here are some links?
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Launching a spacecraft is a big investment. If anything goes wrong, you've got hundreds of millions of dollars of junk in space. And even if the spacecraft is working perfectly, but just runs out of fuel, its communications equipment can't be directed at the Earth properly.
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NASA announced that it has selected 7 new experiments that might be carried to the Moon as part of the Vision for Space Exploration. Each of these missions would be "suitcase science" experiments, which the astronauts could easily deploy them onto the surface of the moon as part of a mission.
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If and when astronomers finally start discovering life on other worlds, they'll be wondering what kinds of lifeforms are there. They probably won't have plants as we know them, but there'll be some kind of life that converts light from the Sun into energy. What would this life look like?
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I hope everyone out there had a great weekend. Here's what's happening out in the astrosphere.
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Asteroids Carnival of Space distance from earth distance from the sun Earth earth from space Earth Observation gravity images ISS Jupiter LCROSS LRO Mars Mercury milky way Moon NASA Neptune photos Physics picture pictures planet earth planet mercury planets Pluto satellite Satellites Saturn Solar System Space Flight spaceflight Space Shuttle Star stars sun telescope Telescopes the sun Uranus Venus volcano volcanoes Where In the Universe?
