Nancy Atkinson, Author at Universe Today

November 26, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Canadian Meteor Update: 10-Ton Rock Responsible

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The search is on for fragments of a 10-ton rock that lit the sky over western Canada last Thursday evening. Scientists estimate that at the time it hit Earth’s atmosphere, the asteroid fragment weighed approximately 10 tons and was probably about the size of a desk. It exploded with the force of 300 tons of dynamite, and hundreds of fragments of the meteorite weighing more than 50 grams (1.76 ounces) are likely strewn over a wide area. The speed of entry was relatively slow, about 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) per second, well below the average 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) per second of most meteorites, said University of Calgary researcher Alan Hildebrand. Amateur astronomers, meteorite hunters and rock hounds have been combing the prairies in western Canada for a 10-ton meteorite that lit the sky and exploded with the force of 300 tons of dynamite, according to experts from the Canadian Space Agency.

The fireball first appeared approximately 80 kilometers above and just east of the border city of Lloydminster, Alberta/Saskatchewan, and traveled SSE towards the Battle River valley fragmenting spectacularly in a series of explosions. Researchers were able to estimate it’s size and energy from infrasound recordings, said Dr. Peter Brown, Canada Research Chair in Meteor Physics at the University of Western Ontario. Infrasound is very low frequency sound produced by explosions that can travel thousands of kilometers.

“At least half a dozen infrasound stations ranging from Greenland to Utah, including Canada’s Lac Du Bonnett, Manitoba and Elgin Field, Ontario stations, recorded energy from the fireball’s explosions. The indicated energy is approximately one third of a kiloton of TNT,” Brown said.

Dr. Brown also says that a fireball this size only occurs over Canada once every five years on average. About ten fireballs of this size occur somewhere over the Earth each year.

The fireball penetrated the atmosphere at a steep angle of approximately 60 degrees from the horizontal and lasted about five seconds from 17:26:40 to 17:26:45 MST with the largest explosion at 17:26:44. The fireball was recorded on all-sky and security cameras scattered across Saskatchewan and Alberta in addition to being witnessed by tens of thousands of people who saw it streak across the sky, and may be one of the best documented meteorite falls.

But the researchers are looking for any additional information they can find.

“We are now trying to get all the transient information about the fireball before it is lost. Many motels and gas stations only keep their security recordings for one week or less, so we urge everyone to check their systems to see if they recorded the fireball or the moving shadows that it cast,” Hildebrand said. “Three gas stations and motels in Lloydminster, Lashburn and Maidstone are known to have records, but dozens of other businesses in the area probably have the fireball or its shadows recorded.”

If fireball images are found, he suggests immediately saving a copy and contacting him. “With the security camera footage we can compute the fireball’s trajectory in the sky to calculate the prefall orbit. Meteorites have only ever been recovered from known orbits nine times previously and we want to make that ten. ”

Source: PhysOrg

November 26, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Sweet! Galactic Molecule Could Point to Alien Life

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An organic sugar molecule which is directly linked to the origin of life has been detected in a region of our galaxy where habitable planets could exist. Using the IRAM radio telescope in France, an international team of scientists found the molecule in a massive star forming region of space, about 26,000 light years from Earth. “This is an important discovery, as it is the first time glycolaldehyde, a basic sugar, has been detected near a star-forming region where planets that could potentially harbour life may exist,” said Dr. Serena Viti, one of the paper’s authors. Glycolaldehyde can react to form ribose, a key constituent of the nucleic acid RNA, thought to be the central molecule in the origin of life.

Glycolaldehyde has previously only been detected near the center of our galaxy, where conditions are extreme compared to the rest of the galaxy. But its discovery in an area far from the galactic center in an area known as ‘G31.41+0.31’ suggests that the production of this key ingredient for life could be common throughout the galaxy. This is good news in our search for alien life, because a wide spread of the molecule improves the chances of its existing alongside other molecules vital to life, and in regions where Earth-like planets may exist.

Professor Keith Mason, Chief Executive of the STFC, said that “the discovery of an organic sugar molecule in a star-forming region of space is very exciting and will provide incredibly useful information in our search for alien life. Research like this, combined with the vast array of other astronomical projects involving UK researchers, is continually expanding our knowledge of the Universe and keeping the UK at the forefront of astronomy.”

Hanny’s Voorwerp Revealed?

Ever since Hanny Van Arkel found an unusual object while scanning through images as an enthusiastic Galaxy Zoo volunteer, astronomers and astronomy enthusiasts have wondered what the bizarre object, known as “Hanny’s Voorwerp” actually is. Now, new observations made by radio telescopes may have finally revealed the nature of the Voorwerp (Dutch for “object.”) It appears as though a jet of highly energetic particles is being generated by a massive black hole at the center of IC2497, creating an ionized gas cloud.

While surfing through hundred’s of images over a year ago, Hanny, a Dutch school teacher noticed a huge green irregular cloud of gas of galactic scale, located about 60,000 light years from a nearby galaxy, IC2497. The cloud is enormous and the gas is extremely hot (> 15,000 Celsius) but paradoxically it is devoid of stars.

An international team of astronomers, led by Prof. Mike Garrett, and also Hanny van Arkel herself, have observed IC2497 and the Voorwerp with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) and an e-VLBI array in which the WSRT also participated.

“It looks as though the jet emanating from the black hole clears a path through the dense interstellar medium of IC 2497 towards Hanny’s Voorwerp”, says Garrett. “This cleared channel permits the beam of intense optical and ultraviolet emission associated with the black hole, to illuminate a small part of a large gas cloud that partially surrounds the galaxy. The optical and ultraviolet emission heats and ionizes the gas cloud, thus creating the phenomena known as Hanny’s Voorwerp.”

One remaining question is where does all the hydrogen gas come from? “There is a lot of gas out there – the WSRT observations detect a huge stream of gas that is extended across hundreds of thousands of light years”, says Dr. Gyula Józsa, another member of the team. According to Józsa the total mass of gas is about 5000 million times the mass of the sun. It’s something Dr. Tom Oosterloo thinks he has seen before: “It has all the hallmarks of an interacting system – the gas probably arises from a tidal interaction between IC 2497 and another galaxy, several hundred million years ago.”

Oosterloo also thinks he can identify the culprits, “the stream of gas ends three hundred thousand light years westwards of IC2497 – all the evidence points towards a group of galaxies at the tip of the stream being responsible for this freak cosmic accident”.

Hanny van Arkel, who is visiting the team at ASTRON this week is impressed. “I’m happy we are making progress. Apparently the more we learn about the Voorwerp, the more intriguing it becomes”. Garrett and his team agree – “We think the Voorwerp has a few more secrets to reveal”. The team plan much deeper observations with the WSRT and with other telescopes soon.

Source: ASTRON

November 25, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Crazy Mars Craters

Small Crater on the North Polar Deposits Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

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With all the different spacecraft orbiting and roving on the Red Planet, we’re finding that Mars is a wonderfully diverse and dynamic planet, with some unusual landforms. Take craters, for instance, and especially a few images of craters from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera. The image above shows a small impact crater on the bright north polar ice cap, near where the Phoenix lander sits, now silently. The perennial, or permanent, portion of the north polar cap consists almost entirely of water ice, and so this curious-looking crater in the ice has never melted away. And its obvious how differently craters are formed in ice; ice ejecta just doesn’t look the same as soil! This crater is about 66 meters (215 feet) in diameter, and scientists think the slightly elliptical shape of the crater is a result of an oblique, or a sideways impact (instead of straight down.) And if you think this crater is unusual, how about a crater that looks upside down….

Unusual Mound in North Polar Layered Deposits Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Yes, this mound may actually be a buried impact crater. “The mound may be the remnant of a buried impact crater, which is now being exhumed,” said HiRISE team member Shane Byrne, of the University of Arizona. Byrne said the crater formed as the north polar ice layers were being deposited. The crater itself would have been filled in by ice after it formed.

Most of these craters are buried under the Martian surface and inaccessible to scientists and their instruments. But this crater and its mound were exhumed as erosion formed a trough above and around it. “For reasons that are poorly understood right now, the ice beneath the site of the crater is more resistant to this erosion, so that as the trough is formed, ice beneath the old impact site remained, forming this isolated hill,” Byrne said.

At high resolution, the HiRISE image shows that the mound is made up of polygonal blocks as big as 33 feet (10 meters) across.

Gullies and Light-Toned Outcrops in Crater Wall Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Hopefully this crater rim won’t take on monumental connotations and become known as the H on Mars, but, yes, that’s what it looks like. It’s actually just dark colored outcrops in an otherwise light colored area. You can also see gullies in the crater wall just to the left of the “H,” which scientists probably find more interesting and intriguing than the H.

Lineated Valley Fill and Lobate Debris Aprons in Deuteronilus Mensae Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

And finally, since I have craters on the brain, I’ll call this image the Grey Matter Crater. Doesn’t the texture of this region look like a brain?! Actually, these landforms in the Dueteronilus Mensae region on Mars are made up of complex alignments of small ridges and pits often called “lineated valley fill.” The cause of the texture is not well understood, but may result from patterns in ice-rich soils or ice loss due to sublimation (ice changing into water vapor).

For more HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) mages, browse through the ever-interesting and ever changing HiRISE website.

Source: HiRISE, Fox

November 25, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

The Lifestyles of Famous, Fast-Living Stars

WR 25 and Tr16-244 Credits: NASA, ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain)

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The Carina Nebula contains the famous blue star Eta Carinae, which has the highest luminosity of any star we know. And in the same nebula live two other life-in-the-fastlane stars, and the Hubble Space Telescope has provided this gorgeous, gorgeous image of them. Until recently these colossal stars — two of our galaxy’s most massive luminaries — have been shrouded in mystery, (avoiding the paparazzi, no doubt). But Hubble’s Wide Field Camera has done what only HST’s investigative reporting could unveil, revealing these stars greater detail than ever before. These stars are so bright and powerful that they burn through their hydrogen fuel source faster than other types of stars, leading to a ‘live fast, die young’ stellar lifestyle. And (gasp!) one of the stars has been hiding a secret companion, and (double gasp!) the other star is part of a three-some! Is that why this nebula is giving these stars “the finger?”

The two stars WR 25 and Tr16-244, located within the open cluster Trumpler 16, is embedded within an immense cauldron of gas and dust that lies approximately 7,500 light-years from Earth. They produce incredible amounts of heat, emitting most of their radiation in the ultraviolet and appearing blue in color.

WR 25 is the brightest, situated near the centre of the image. The neighboring Tr16-244 is the third brightest, just to the upper left of WR 25. The second brightest, to the left of WR 25, is a low-mass star located much closer to Earth than the Carina Nebula.

WR 25 is likely to be the most massive and interesting of the two. Its true nature was revealed two years ago when an international group of astronomers led by Roberto Gamen, then at the Universidad de La Serena in Chile, discovered that it is composed of at least two stars.

It’s not usual for massive stars to form in compact clusters, and often, the individual stars are physically so close to each other that it is very difficult to resolve them in telescopes as separate objects. And now, these Hubble observations have revealed that the Tr16-244 system is actually a triple star. (see image below).

WR 25 and Tr16-244 are the likely sources of radiation that is causing a giant gas globule within the Carina Nebula to slowly evaporate away into space, while possibly inducing the formation of new stars within it (see separate image). The radiation is also thought to be responsible for the globule’s interesting shape, prominently featured in earlier Hubble images, which looks like a hand with a ‘defiant’ finger pointing towards WR 25 and Tr16-244.

And if you can’t see it, here’s more detail of “the finger.”

Source: ESA

November 25, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Unusual Red Spiral Galaxies “Strangled”

Images of three galaxies from the Galaxy Zoo (top) and STAGES surveys (bottom) show examples of how the newly discovered population of red spiral galaxies on the outskirts of crowded regions in the Universe may be a missing link in our understanding of galaxy evolution.

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Usually a galaxy’s shape corresponds with its color as well as its age. Spiral galaxies appear blue because they are still dynamically forming hot young stars. Elliptical galaxies, on the other hand, are mostly old, dead, and red. But surprisingly, two international collaborations have both separately identified a population of unusual red spiral galaxies. Galaxy Zoo, which uses volunteers from the general public to classify galaxies and the Space Telescope Galaxy Evolution Survey (STAGES) project have found that many of the red galaxies in crowded regions of galaxy clusters are actually spiral galaxies, bucking the trend for red galaxies to be elliptical in shape. However, these galaxies might be in transition, going from young to old, slowly having the life ‘choked’ out of them. “We think what we’re seeing is galaxies that have been gently strangled, so to speak,” said Chris Lintott, Galaxy Zoo team leader from University of Oxford, “where somehow the gas supply for star formation has been cut off, but that they’ve been strangled so gently that the arms are still there.” Sounds like a CSI murder mystery, but in this case astronomers are studying the scene of the crime.

The STAGES team used the Hubble Space Telescope to look in detail at one particular very large cluster of galaxies, known as the A901/902 and found a surprisingly large number of red spiral galaxies. But they didn’t know if what they were seeing was unusual to only that cluster or even that particular region of space. However the Galaxy Zoo team had found red spirals all across the universe. “STAGES had more detailed observations,” said Linott, “but we showed this is something that happens across the population of galaxies. So it’s nice when you can attack it from both ends at once.”

The two teams have concluded that both the mass of a galaxy as well as its local environment are important in determining when and how quickly its star formation is shut down. The red spirals are found on the outskirts of clusters in crowded regions of space where galaxies cluster together. As a blue galaxy is drawn in by gravity from the rural regions to the suburbs, some sort of an interaction with its environment causes a slow-down in star formation. The closer in a galaxy is, the more it is affected.

Also, the red spirals were also the more massive galaxies, presumably because the smaller ones are transformed more quickly.

So what causes the transformation? The two teams don’t think it was any type of violent interaction.

“Usually, anything disruptive enough to get rid of the gas that fuels the star formation would have disrupted the spiral arms,” said Lintott. “But not so, at least particularly on the outskirts of clusters.” said Lintott.

The cause might be just the galaxy’s gentle interaction with the cluster. “The kind of thing we’re imagining,” explained Lintott, “as the galaxy moves into a denser environment, there’s lot of gas in clusters as well as galaxies, and it’s possible the gas from the galaxy just gets stripped off by the denser medium it’s plowing into.”

The teams have ruled out that a huge quantity of dust in these galaxies is masking a large amount of blue star formation. “Whenever you show a red object to an astronomer they immediately blame dust,” said Lintott, “because dust can absorb light and re-scatter it at a longer wavelength. So the temptation is to say they are just normal galaxies with just lots of dust. But there’s something else going on here, because then you’d expect the effect to be stronger if the spiral was face-on rather than edge- on because you’re looking at more of the galaxy. But we see the red spirals even in galaxies that are face-on. So we know it’s not just the effect of dust and inclination. So the obvious explanation is gone.”

Galaxy Zoo’s armchair astronomers’ biggest contribution wasn’t just the amount of galaxies they could look at (although the 100,000 plus they classified from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was key) but more importantly, they are classifying galaxies purely by shape. “Since most elliptical galaxies are red and most spirals are blue,” said Lintott, ” if you’re sorting galaxies in an automated way, it’s very tempting to use color to sort them. But because we have people doing this we could separate the two out. So first we found all the spirals, and then we looked at their colors.”

This work is just the beginning of more investigations into these unusual red spiral galaxies. “This paper is our first look at all of this,” Lintott said. “One thing we’re particularly excited about that we’re working on now is looking to see what the black holes in these galaxies are doing. Whenever you see star formation being turned off, we like to blame the black hole. So it will be interesting to see what’s going on there.”

For more information:
Galaxy Zoo
STAGES

Galaxy Zoo’s paper
STAGES paper

Sources: RAS, interview with Chris Lintott

November 24, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

It’s Official: Juno is Going to Jupiter

NASA has decided to return to Jupiter with a mission to conduct an unprecedented, in-depth study of the largest planet in our solar system. The mission is called Juno, and it will be the first in which a spacecraft is placed in a highly elliptical polar orbit around the giant planet to understand its formation, evolution and structure. Missions to Jupiter have been on again, off again, with a mission to Europa falling during the 2006 budget cuts, and the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (which would have used a nuclear reactor to power an ion engine to send an orbiter to 3 of Jupiter’s moons) getting the ax in 2005. Juno has been on the table since 2004, surviving budget cuts, although the mission has experienced delays. But it looks official now, and the spacecraft is scheduled to launch in August 2011, reaching Jupiter in 2016.

Scientists say studying Jupiter is important because it hold secrets to the fundamental processes and conditions that governed our early solar system. “Jupiter is the archetype of giant planets in our solar system and formed very early, capturing most of the material left after the sun formed,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Unlike Earth, Jupiter’s giant mass allowed it to hold onto its original composition, providing us with a way of tracing our solar system’s history.”

The spacecraft will orbit Jupiter 32 times, skimming about 3,000 miles over the planet’s cloud tops for approximately one year. The mission will be the first solar powered spacecraft designed to operate despite the great distance from the sun.

Artists concept of Juno at Jupiter. Credit: NASA

“Jupiter is more than 400 million miles from the sun or five times further than Earth,” Bolton said. “Juno is engineered to be extremely energy efficient.”

The spacecraft will use a camera and nine science instruments to study the hidden world beneath Jupiter’s colorful clouds. The suite of science instruments will investigate the existence of an ice-rock core, Jupiter’s intense magnetic field, water and ammonia clouds in the deep atmosphere, and explore the planet’s aurora borealis.

Understanding the formation of Jupiter is essential to understanding the processes that led to the development of the rest of our solar system and what the conditions were that led to Earth and humankind. Similar to the sun, Jupiter is composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. A small percentage of the planet is composed of heavier elements. However, Jupiter has a larger percentage of these heavier elements than the sun.

“Juno gives us a fantastic opportunity to get a picture of the structure of Jupiter in a way never before possible,” said James Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “It will allow us to take a giant step forward in our understanding on how giant planets form and the role that plays in putting the rest of the solar system together. ”

The last mission to Jupiter was the Galileo mission, which began its observations of the giant planet in 1995, made 35 orbits, and then was intentionally flown into the planet in 2003 to avoid any contamination of Jupiter’s moons.

Source: NASA

November 24, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Sources of Earth-Bombarding Cosmic Rays May Have Been Located

The cosmic ray hot spots were identified in the two red-colored regions near the constellation Orion. Courtesy John Pretz, LANL

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Last week’s announcement of a puzzling and unknown source of high energy cosmic rays bombarding the Earth is now joined by another discovery of two sources of unexpected cosmic rays from nearby regions of space. A Los Alamos National Laboratory cosmic-ray observatory has seen for the first time two distinct hot spots that appear to be bombarding Earth with an excess of cosmic rays. “These two results may be due to the same, or different, astrophysical phenomenon, said Jordan Goodman, principal investigator for the Milagro observatory, commenting on last week’s announcement by the ATIC experiment and the new discovery by his team. “However, they both suggest the presence of high-energy particle acceleration in the vicinity of the earth. Our new findings point to general locations for the localized excesses of cosmic-ray protons.” The cosmic rays appear to originate from an area in the sky near the constellation Orion.

Researchers used Los Alamos’ Milagro cosmic-ray observatory to peer into the sky above the northern hemisphere for nearly seven years starting in July 2000. The observatory is unique in that it monitors the entire sky above the northern hemisphere. Because of its design and field of view, Milagro was able to record over 200 billion cosmic-ray collisions with the Earth’s atmosphere.

Cosmic rays are high-energy particles that move through our Galaxy from sources far away. No one knows exactly where cosmic rays come from, but scientists theorize they might originate from supernovae—massive stars that explode— from quasars or perhaps from other exotic, less-understood or yet-to-be-discovered sources within the universe.

“Our observatory is unique in that we can detect events of low enough energies that we were able to record enough cosmic-ray encounters to see a statistically significant fractional excess coming from two distinct regions of the sky,” said collaborator Brenda Dingus.

Because Milagro was able to record so many cosmic-ray events, researchers for the first time were able to see statistical peaks in the number of cosmic-ray events originating from specific regions of the sky near the constellation Orion. The region with the highest hot spot of cosmic rays is a concentrated bulls eye above and to the right visually of Orion, near the constellation Taurus. The other hot spot is a comma-shaped region visually occurring near the constellation Gemini.

But the researchers cannot be sure they have precisely located the sources of the cosmic rays. “Whatever the source of the protons we observed with Milagro, their path to Earth is deflected by the magnetic field of the Milky Way so that we cannot directly tell exactly where they originate,” said Goodman. “And whether the regions of excess seen by Milagro actually point to a source of cosmic rays, or are the result of some other unknown nearby effect is an important question raised by our observations.”

A new, second-generation cosmic ray observatory has been proposed, which may be able to solve the mystery of the origin of cosmic rays. The experiment, named the High Altitude Water Cherenkov experiment (HAWC), would be built at a high-altitude site in Mexico.

Sources: UMD, Science Daily

November 24, 2008March 9, 2023 by Nancy Atkinson

Mr. Fixit In Space Invents Zero-G Coffee Cup

Pettit and the Zero G Coffee Cup. Credit: NASA TV

I have no doubt that the astronauts on board the International Space Station and shuttle Endeavour will be able to fix the balky urine recycling water system. Why? Mr. Fixit is part of the crew.

During his stay on the ISS in 2002/2003 as part of Expedition 6, astronaut Don Pettit became well known for his Saturday Morning Science and tinkering with broken hardware. He’s also renowned among astronauts for building or fixing things with paper clips. But now as part of the STS-126 shuttle crew, he has invented something close to his heart: a zero-g coffee cup.

Like many Americans, Pettit loves his coffee. But drinking coffee from a bag just isn’t the same as sipping and savoring your morning brew. Until now, all liquids have been sipped from a bag in space because of how liquids operate in a zero gravity environment. But during his off-time on Sunday, Pettit used a piece of plastic ripped from his Flight Data File mission book and folded it into a airplane-wing shaped cup.

How does it work?

Surface tension inside the cup keeps the coffee from getting out and floating around the ISS and possibly causing problems.

“We’re no longer sipping from a bag, we can drink from a cup,” said Pettit. “With the special shape of this cup, the surface tension forces will wick the coffee up along the edge.”

The cross section of the cup looks like an airplane wing, and the narrow angle will ‘wick’ the liquid up. “This is what we use when we design fuel tanks for rockets to reignite in weightless environment,” said Pettit. “The veins in the tank will wick the fluids into the suction port. Knowing this for a fuel tank, you can make a cup, and you can enjoy sipping a cup of coffee instead of drinking from a bag.”

See a video here from on collectSPACE.

But Pettit was also busy yesterday using his tinkering skills to fix the water recycling system which will allow astronauts to convert urine, sweat and other used water into potable water. The problem with the system appears to be too much vibration from a centrifuge motor, and on Sunday Pettit removed some rubber dampers from a distillation assembly in hopes of fixing the problem. While the system ran longer than it has previously, it ultimately shut down once again.

The water recycling system is crucial for NASA’s plans to increase the station’s crew size from three to six in May 2009. NASA managers had hoped to collect test water from the urine recycling system and send samples home with the shuttle crew for testing to make sure the water is safe for drinking and cooking.. and making coffee. So, with Pettit aboard, I’m thinking the water recycling system is in good hands, and fixing it is probably a priority for him.

“I like to call it the coffee machine,” said Pettit in an interview before launch about the urine to water system. “It will take yesterday’s coffee and turn it into today’s coffee.”

Sources: collectSPACE, Space.com

November 24, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

SpaceX Wakes Up the Neighbors

SpaceX Falcon 9 test. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX conducted a successful full mission-length firing of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle’s first stage at its McGregor Test Facility in Texas, late Saturday evening, November 22. But the big news wasn’t the success of the firing, but the brouhaha it created with the neighboring communities. The test occurred at 10:30 pm local time, and the light and noise created by the test was unprecedented, causing a bit of panic. People said it sounded like a bomb exploding, that their house and windows shook the entire time, and one woman said her son was scared the sun was exploding. Television news reports convey the panic, and some online newspaper articles have an incredible amount of comments posted. But SpaceX has conducted over 2,000 previous engine tests and this one is the only test that prompted such a commotion … why?

SpaceX spokesperson Lauren Dryer said the weather conditions at the time of the test contributed to sound and light traveling further. “A combination of low clouds and cool temperatures drastically affected the distance the sound and light traveled,” Dryer said, making the test easier to see and hear from much farther away. She said the company has never had any previous calls or concerns with test firings, even though SpaceX has conducted more than 2,000 tests since operations began in 2003, including 10 multiple-engine tests similar to Saturday’s. SpaceX said they notified local police and fire departments about the test, put a notice in the local newspaper and even put it on the marquee of the area high school, but obviously many residents had no clue the test was going to occur. SpaceX said they will try to put out more notices about future tests as well as invite the media to cover them.

For the static test firing, the first stage remained firmly secured to a huge vertical test stand, where it fired for 178 seconds or nearly three minutes, which simulates the climb the rocket will take to Earth orbit. At full power, the rocket generated 855,000 pounds of force at sea level. In vacuum, the thrust increases to approximately one million pounds or four times the maximum thrust of a 747 aircraft. The test consumed over half a million pounds of propellant.

All nine engines fired for 160 seconds, then two engines were shut down to limit the acceleration and the remaining seven engines continued firing for 18 more seconds, as would occur in a typical climb to orbit. The test firing validated the design of SpaceX’s use of nine engines on the first stage, as well as the ability to shut down engines without affecting the functioning of the remaining engines. This demonstrates the ability of Falcon 9 to lose engines in flight and still complete its mission successfully, much as a commercial airliner is designed to be safe in the event of an engine loss. The Falcon 9 will be the first vehicle since the Saturn V and Saturn 1 to have the ability to lose any engine/motor and still be able to complete its mission without loss of crew or spacecraft.

Sources: SpaceX, Waco Tribune Herald, KXXV TV