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| What's Up This Week - September 19 - September 25, 2005 |
Sep 19, 2005 - Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! Let's begin the week early in the morning by watching Saturn dancing near the "Beehive", move into the night with the ISS and a great a variable star - Eta Aquilae. As the skies darken this week, we'll return to the Andromeda galaxy and hunt down the M30. Have you ever seen the "Saturn" or "Helix" nebulae? Don't think them too difficult to find, because a few simple tricks will turn you into a pro and you'll find Neptune as well! Hang on, it just gets better as the Aurigid meteor shower peaks and a new comet joins some old favourites. So turn your eyes to the skies, because...
Here's what's up! (Full Story) |
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| Astronauts could return to the Moon as early as 2018. Image credit: NASA/JPL. Click to enlarge. |
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| New Details About Return to the Moon |
| Sep 19, 2005 - NASA has unveiled more details about its upcoming series of missions to return humans to the Moon as early as 2018. The new crew vehicle will look very similar to the old Apollo module but it will be three times larger, allowing four astronauts to travel to the Moon at a time. Each ship can be reused 10 times, and NASA hopes to get as many as 2 launches a year, with astronauts spending 4-7 days on the surface. Eventually, once a lunar outpost is built at the southern pole, astronauts will be able to live on the Moon for 6 months at a time. (Full Story) |
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| Book Review: The Rocket Company |
| Sep 19, 2005 - Some people dream in black and white while others dream in techni-colour. Daydreamers wander the realm of possibilities just as well as the sleepers. Subjects of dreams differ as greatly as the dreamer. Engineers, particularly astro-engineers, probably have recurrent dreams of launching into a project destined for the stars. Well, if dreams don't come true, there's always the pen and paper. That's how the book The Rocket Company by Patrick Stiennon and David Hoerr seems to have risen. Using the literary licence of a fictional company, the authors bring a wealth of non-fictional detail to a pleasant little dream. (Full Story) |
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| Methane Release Raised Earth Temperatures 180 Million Years Ago |
| Sep 19, 2005 - Researchers from Open University have uncovered that the Earth suffered a sudden, severe period of global warming approximately 180 million years ago. During this period, vast quantities of methane gas were released in three huge pulses when underwater stores of gas hydrate melted. This greenhouse gas warmed the Earth by 10 degrees C and resulted in the extinction of many species on land and in the oceans. (Full Story) |
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| An image showing faint, narrow spokes in the outer B ring. Image credit: NASA/JPL Click to enlarge |
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| Ghostly Spokes in the Rings |
| Sep 19, 2005 - Scientists celebrated this week after finally seeing ghostly spokes in Saturn's rings. These spokes were first discovered by NASA's Voyager spacecraft 25 years ago, but so far, Cassini had failed to image them. These spokes are about 2,500 km long and 100 km wide (2,200 miles by 60 miles), and are believed to be created by Saturn's magnetic field interacting with the rings. Scientists thought that the visibility of the spokes depended on the angle of Saturn's rings to the Sun; the less sunlight, the easier it should be to spot the spokes. (Full Story) |
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| The boundary of the bright (rough) region and the dark (smooth) region appears to be a shoreline. Image credit: NASA/JPL Click to enlarge |
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| Shoreline Found on Titan |
| Sep 19, 2005 - Cassini has taken images of what seems to be an ancient shoreline cutting across Titan's southern hemisphere. The shoreline runs about 1,700 km long by 170 km wide (1,060 miles by 106 miles) and might still have liquid present. There is evidence for networks of channels that feed liquid - most likely liquid hydrocarbons - into this "ocean"; some might come from springs, while others will have to have been fed by rainfall. Cassini's next flyby is set for October 26, 2005. (Full Story) |
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