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| Image credit: Tunc Tezel |
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| What's Up This Week - December 5 - December 11, 2005 |
Dec 5, 2005 - Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! The Moon is back and tonight it will dance with Venus. Selene and the bright planets will grace this week's night skies as our observing year rapidly draws to a close. There will be plenty of lunar features to study, as well as some very colorful stars. As luck would have it, we have not one - but two - meteor showers to watch as well! Let's head out to explore, because...
Here's what's up! (Full Story) |
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| Opportunity's image of an outcrop called "Olympia". Image credit: NASA Click to enlarge |
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| Opportunity Nears its Second Martian Year |
| Dec 5, 2005 - On December 11, NASA's Opportunity rover will join its partner Spirit to celebrate a full Martian year on the Red Planet. Both rovers will now have experienced all of the Martian seasons, and now they're nearing the end of the Martian summer. Opportunity is currently exploring exposed bedrock along a route between Endurance and Victoria craters, and recently found rock that seems to be younger than what it discovered inside Endurance crater. These rocks seem to be petrified sand dunes, and show a longer term cycle of wetness and dryness in the region. (Full Story) |
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| New View of Space Weather Cold Fronts |
| Dec 5, 2005 - Scientists from NASA and the National Science Foundation have created a new way to view the Earth's atmosphere during space storms. These large-scale storms resemble weather cold fronts that result from plumes of electrified plasma that flash across the Earth's ionosphere. These plumes used to seem like random events, but scientists have gotten pretty good at predicting them now, using a fleet of spacecraft. For the first time, they can now directly connect plasma observed in the atmosphere with these plumes that can extend thousands of kilometres into space. (Full Story) |
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| Huygens Sunk Into Soft Ground |
| Dec 5, 2005 - When ESA's Huygens probe touched down on the surface of Titan earlier this year, it hit hard, and then slumped sideways into the soft ground. After analyzing the landing in detail, ESA scientists have calculated that Huygens probably hit a surface similar to soft clay, lightly packed snow, or wet or dry sand. It penetrated about 10mm into the ground, and then settled slightly over time by a few millimetres, tilting the probe a few degrees. It's possible that Huygens landed on a Titan beach, shortly after the hydrocarbon ocean tide went out. (Full Story) |
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| Book Review: Space Systems Failures |
| Dec 5, 2005 - Get a flat while riding a bike and you fix it, though you may never see the tack on the road that caused the puncture. However on the failure of a space mission, the whole aerospace industry might be left scratching their heads as to what happened and why. David Harland and Ralph Lorenz in their book Space Systems Failures lay down the known space failures before the reader in great detail and full disclosure. There's the occasional rescue of launcher payloads that slightly lighten this otherwise negative subject, but from the number and variety of faults they leave no doubt that space ventures are more a gamble than a certainty. (Full Story) |
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