Nancy Atkinson, Author at Universe Today

November 13, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Rescued Moon Photos Restored to Unprecedented Detail

Restored Earthrise. Credit: MoonViews.com

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Earlier this week we had a story about old data from the Apollo missions that could potentially be lost if an “antique” computer from the 1960’s can’t be renovated. But now comes good news about more old data which has actually been restored and enhanced to an exceedingly high quality. Some of the first ever close-up images of the lunar landscape have been given new life, rivaling the images being taken by today’s high definition cameras. NASA and some private space business leaders spent a quarter million dollars rescuing the historic photos from early NASA lunar robotic probes and restoring them in an abandoned McDonald’s. The first refurbished image was released Thursday, a 42-year old classic image of the moon with Earth rising in the background.

In 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five Lunar Orbiter missions to photograph the surface of the moon to prepare for the Apollo missions to land humans on the lunar surface. Data were recorded on large magnetic tapes and transferred to photographic film for scientific analysis. When these images were first retrieved from lunar orbit, only a portion of their true resolution was available because of the limited technology available. A special machine was needed to just to view the images.

Initially, the moon pictures were the hit of the 1960s. The photo released Thursday was the first of Earth from a great distance, until it was outdone by Apollo 8 astronauts, the first to orbit the moon. And a 1966 close-up of the moon was hailed by some media as the “picture of the century.”

After the Apollo missions, with all the images taken by the astronauts, the Lunar Orbiter images were essentially forgotten. The tapes with the images were put in storage. The specialized machines were offered free to anyone who would haul them away.

Nancy Evans, co-founder of the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS) took a couple machines in order to make sure the data taken by the Lunar Orbiters wasn’t lost. For a time in the 1980’s Evans worked on digitizing the images, but when funding dried up, the drives sat in a barn in Sun Valley, CA for the next several decades.

In 2007, Nancy Evans tried to find someone to take the drives. Dennis Wingo, a private space entrepreneur heard about this and contacted Keith Cowing from NASA Watch. Wingo and Cowing subsequently obtained the drives and tapes. They took over a shuttered McDonald’s at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and patched together one working machine to read the tapes, used in combination with today’s software.

Future images will be made publically available when they are fully processed and calibrated. The intent of this project is to facilitate, wherever possible, the broadest dissemination and public use of these images.

“This is an incredible image,” said Wingo. “In terms of raw resolution, there has been no mission that has flown since or even today that is as good.”

With one photo down, there are 1,983 more to go, if the machine holds up, Wingo said.

These photos will have some use, said Cowing. When NASA launches its the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in the spring, the space agency can compare detailed high-resolution images from 1966 to 2009 and see what changes occurred in 43 years, he said.

“What this gives you is literally before and after photos,” Cowing said. “This is like a time machine.”

For more information see NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project and MoonViews.com. Here are some Apollo 13 pictures.

Sources: NASA Watch, AP, NASA

November 13, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Hubble Takes First Visible Light Image of Extrasolar Planet

Fomalhaut and orbiting planet. Credit: NASA, ESA and P. Kalas (University of California, Berkeley, USA)

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Persistence has paid off for astronomer Paul Kalas. After eight years and taking repeated photographs with the Hubble Space Telescope of a nearby star, he finally has what he and many astronomers have been striving for: the first visible-light snapshot of a planet outside our solar system. This coincides with the announcement of the first time astronomers have taken pictures of another multi-planet solar system, using the Gemini and Keck Telescopes. Kalas has been studying the star Fomalhaut, located about 25 light years from Earth, for several years. He knew the planet was there, because its perturbations were evident in the ring of gas and dust surrounding the star. The planet is probably close to the mass of Jupiter, and it orbits Fomalhaut at a distance about four times that between Neptune and the sun. Formally known as Fomalhaut b, the planet could have a ring system about the dimension of Jupiter’s early rings, before the dust and debris coalesced into the four Galilean moons. Learn more in the video below…

The planet’s existence was suspected in 2005, when images Kalas took with the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys showed a sharply defined inner edge to the dust belt around Fomalhaut, in the southern constellation Piscus Austrinus. The sharp edge and off-center belt suggested to Kalas that a planet in an elliptical orbit around the star was shaping the inner edge of the belt, much like Saturn’s moons groom the edges of its rings.

“The gravity of Fomalhaut b is the key reason that the vast dust belt surrounding Fomalhaut is cleanly sculpted into a ring and offset from the star,” Kalas said. “We predicted this in 2005, and now we have the direct proof.”

Check out this video from ESA about the discovery:

“It will be hard to argue that a Jupiter-mass object orbiting an A star like Fomalhaut is anything other than a planet,” said coauthor James R. Graham, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. “That doesn’t mean it’s exactly what we expected when we went hunting for planets in this system.”

“Every planet has a chaotic zone, which is basically a swath of space that encloses the planet’s orbit and from which the planet ejects all particles,” said Eugene Chiang, a UC Berkeley associate professor of astronomy and of earth and planetary science, and first author of the ApJ paper. “This zone increases with the mass of the planet, so, given the size of the chaotic zone around Fomalhaut b, we can estimate that its likely mass is in the vicinity of one Jupiter mass.”

Fomalhaut annotated. Credit: Credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI)

Kalas now has two photographs of the planet, taken in 2004 and 2006, which show that its movement over a 21-month period exactly fits what would be expected from a planet orbiting Fomalhaut every 872 years at a distance of 119 astronomical units, or 11 billion miles. One astronomical unit (AU) is the average distance between the Earth and the sun, or 93 million miles.

“I nearly had a heart attack at the end of May when I confirmed that Fomalhaut b orbits its parent star,” Kalas said. “It’s a profound and overwhelming experience to lay eyes on a planet never before seen.”

Sources: EurekAlert, ESA’s Space Telescope site

November 13, 2008January 31, 2023 by Nancy Atkinson

First Image of Another Multi-Planet Solar System

Image shows two of the three confirmed planets indicated as "b" and "c" on the image above. "b" is the ~7 Jupiter-mass planet orbiting at about 70 AU, "c" is the ~10 Jupiter-mass planet orbiting the star at about 40 AU. Credit: Gemini Observatory

Here’s what we’ve all been waiting for: for the first time, astronomers have taken pictures of a multi-planet solar system, much like ours, orbiting another star. This coincides with announcement of the first visible light image of an extrasolar planet taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. This new solar system orbits a dusty young star named HR8799, which is 140 light years away and about 1.5 times the size of our sun. Three planets, roughly 10, 10 and 7 times the mass of Jupiter, orbit the star. The size of the planets decreases with distance from the parent star, much like the giant planets do in our system. And there may be more planets out there, but scientists say they just haven’t seen them yet.

“We’ve been trying to image planets for eight years with no luck and now we have pictures of three planets at once,” said Bruce Macintosh, an astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Using high-contrast, near-infrared adaptive optics observations with the Keck and Gemini telescopes, the team of researchers were able to see three orbiting planetary companions to HR8799.

Astronomers have known for a decade through indirect techniques that the sun was not the only star with orbiting planets.

“But we finally have an actual image of an entire system,” Macintosh said. “This is a milestone in the search and characterization of planetary systems around stars.”

Three exoplanets orbiting a young star 140 light years away are captured using Keck Observatory near-infrared adaptive optics. The planets are labeled and the two outer ones have arrows showing the size of their motion over a 4 year period.

The planets are 24, 37 and 67 times the Earth-sun separation from the host star. The furthest planet in the new system orbits just inside a disk of dusty debris, similar to that produced by the comets of the Kuiper belt of our solar system (just beyond the orbit of Neptune at 30 times Earth-sun distance).

“HR8799’s dust disk stands out as one of the most massive in orbit around any star within 300 light years of Earth” said UCLA’s Ben Zuckerman.

Binocular finder chart for the star HR 8799 in Pegasus. Credit: "Gemini Observatory Illustration by Stephen James O'Meara" — *Binocular finder chart for the star HR 8799 in Pegasus. Credit: “Gemini Observatory Illustration by Stephen James O’Meara”*

The host star is known as a bright, blue A-type star. These types of stars are usually ignored in ground and space-based direct imaging surveys since they offer a less favorable contrast between a bright star and a faint planet. But they do have an advantage over our sun: Early in their life, they can retain heavy disks of planet-making material and therefore form more massive planets at wider separations that are easier to detect. In the recent study, the star also is young – less than 100 million years old – which means its planets are still glowing with heat from their formation.

“Seeing these planets directly – separating their light from the star – lets us study them as individuals, and use spectroscopy to study their properties, like temperature or composition,” Macintosh said.

During the past 10 years, various planet detection techniques have been used to find more than 200 exoplanets. But these methods all have limitations. Most infer the existence of a planet through its
influence on the star that it orbits, but don’t actually tell scientists anything about the planet other than its mass and orbit. Second, the techniques are all limited to small to moderate planet-star separation, usually less than about 5 astronomical units.

The planets themselves each appear very interesting.

“Detailed comparison with theoretical model atmospheres confirms that all three planets possess complex atmospheres with dusty clouds partially trapping and re-radiating the escaping heat” said Lowell Observatory astronomer Travis Barman.

Source: Gemini Observatory

November 12, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Cassini Finds New Mysterious Infrared Aurora

An infrared camera aboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has discovered a unique aurora lighting up Saturn’s polar cap. The mysterious new aurora is unlike any other known in our solar system. “We’ve never seen an aurora like this elsewhere,” said Tom Stallard, an RCUK Academic Fellow working with Cassini data at the University of Leicester. Stallard is lead author of a paper released today (13th
November) in the journal Nature. “It’s not just a ring of aurorae like those we’ve seen at Jupiter or Earth. This one covers an enormous area across the pole. Our current ideas on what forms Saturn’s aurorae predict that this region should be empty, so finding such a bright one here is a fantastic surprise.”

Aurorae are caused when charged particles stream along the magnetic field of a planet and into its atmosphere. On Earth these charged particles come from the solar wind – a stream of particles that
emanates from the Sun.

Jupiter’s main auroral ring, caused by interactions internal to Jupiter’s magnetic environment, is constant in size. Saturn’s main aurora, which is caused by the solar wind, changes size dramatically as the wind varies. The newly observed aurora at Saturn, however, doesn’t fit into either category.

“Saturn’s unique auroral features are telling us there is something special and unforeseen about this planet’s magnetosphere and the way it interacts with the solar wind and the planet’s atmosphere,” said
Nick Achilleos, Cassini scientist on the Cassini magnetometer team at the University College London. “Trying to explain its origin will no doubt lead us to physics which uniquely operates in the environment of Saturn.”

The new infrared aurora appears in a region hidden from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which has provided views of Saturn’s ultraviolet aurora. Cassini observed it when the spacecraft flew near Saturn’s polar region. In infrared light, the aurora sometimes fills the region from around 82 degrees north all the way over the pole. This new aurora is also constantly changing, even disappearing within a 45 minute-period.

Source: NASA

November 12, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Less Than 20 Years Until First Contact?

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The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) has come online with its initial configuration of 42 antennas. The project, led by the SETI Institute, is a non-governmental project funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in which eventually 350 small radio antennas will scan the sky for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. To test the system, the ATA sucessfully picked up the New Horizons probe on its way to Pluto. Senior SETI scientist Seth Shostak said at an event in San Francisco Tuesday night that the array could become strong enough by 2025 to look deep enough into space to find extraterrestrial signals. “We’ll find E.T. within two dozen years,” he said.

That’s, of course, assuming the distance we can look into space will be increased with new instruments yet to be built, and that the projected computing power under Moore’s Law actually happens.

Shostak estimated that if the assumptions about computing power and the strength of forthcoming research instruments are correct, we should be able to search as far out as 500 light years into space by 2025, a distance he predicted would be enough–based on scientist Frank Drake’s estimate of there being 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy alone capable of creating radio transmitters–to find evidence of intelligent life that is broadcasting its existence.

Only time will tell.

For the New Horizons observation, made Sept. 10, operators of the ATA used a synthesized beam formed with 11 of the array’s 6.1-meter (20 foot) antennas – a method called “beamforming” that electronically combines the antennas into a single virtual telescope. The 8.4-GHz spacecraft carrier signal was then fed into the SETI Prelude detection system.

“We’re happy to be the ATA’s new friend in the sky, helping SETI to verify the operations of their electronics,” says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern. “It’s also nice to know that someone else is checking in on us during our long voyage to Pluto and beyond.”

And what does New Horizons look like to the Allen Telescope Array? This plot shows 678 hertz (Hz) of spectrum collected over 98 seconds. The New Horizons signal can be easily seen as a bright diagonal line, drifting at rate of -0.6 > Hz/second.

What New Horizons looks like to The ATA. Credit: SETI Institute

Sources: CNET, New Horizons

November 12, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

This Week’s “Where In The Universe” Challenge

Here’s this week’s “Where In The Universe” challenge. Take a look and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. The new way we’re doing this challenge is that we’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section — if you dare! Check back tomorrow on this same post to see how you did. Good luck!

UPDATE (11/3): The answer has now been posted below. If you haven’t made your guess yet, no peeking before you do!!

Nice job on this one, everyone. Yes, its the sun. This image was taken back in July of 2002 of an active region of the sun. The image was produced by the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope on the island of La Palma, Spain. (I apologize, obviously that’s not a “spacecraft” and I should not have used the word “spacecraft” in the above paragraph — habits are hard to break.) These aren’t just little bumps on the sun. The structures in the dark sunspots in the upper central area of the image show distinct elevation above the dark “floor” of the sunspot. The height of the structures has been estimated by astronomers to be between 200 and 450 km, and the smallest resolvable features in the image are about 70 km in size! Wow!

I actually saw this image first on the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture, but here’s the original press release and info on this great image of the sun.

November 12, 2008April 26, 2016 by Nancy Atkinson

Europa Submarine Prototype Gets Another Test

ENDURANCE submarine. Credit: John Rummel, NASA

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A submersible probe that could possibly be used on Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa is taking the next step to test its capabilities. The Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer, also known as ENDURANCE, will swim untethered under ice, and collect data to create three-dimensional maps of underwater environments. The probe also will take samples of microbial life. Earlier this year, it operated successfully in a 25 meter frozen lake in Wisconsin, USA. Now it will plunge under a permanently ice covered lake in Antarctica that is 40 meters deep. ENDURANCE isn’t like the Mars Rovers or other remote-operated probes. Once deployed, it’s on its own to systematically explore, take water samples, and find its way back. “It will have to think on its own,” said Peter Doran, an Earth scientist at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

In the February 2008 test, ENDURANCE successfully found its way around the bottom of the lake and back to the hole that drilled in the ice to get the probe in and out of the lake. It also demonstrated that its electronics functioned perfectly well in cold water.

At Lake Bonney in Antarctica, ENDURANCE will not only map the lake and explore its biology, but also take a close look at the base of a feature called Blood Falls, where reddish, iron-containing salts spill out of the face of a glacier at the lake’s upper end.

If all goes well the next test would have the probe or an improved version descend through 3.5 km of ice to one of the world’s largest, deepest and most mysterious lakes, Lake Vostok, also in Antarctica.
But even that pales in comparison to what a probe might encounter at Europa. Scientists believe that Europa’s ocean could be up to 100 kilometers deep, under 6 kilometers of ice.

Hot water drills will bore a hole for ENDURANCE to enter the water in Antarctica. If all goes well, the probe will be tested again in 2009.

But many hurdles remain before an underwater vehicle could possibly head to Europa. Presently, Endurance is too massive to send on interplanetary travel. Engineers will also have to come up with a way to drill through Europa’s icy crust and lower the sub safely through the ice.

But many scientists feel that an orbiting spacecraft would be the best way to study Europa, before sending an underwater probe. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is currently working on a concept called the Europa Explorer which would deliver a low orbit spacecraft to determine the presence (or absence) of a liquid water ocean under Europa’s ice surface. It would also map the surface and subsurface for future exploration.

Source: COSMOS

November 11, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Chandrayaan-1 Almost There, UPDATE 11/12

Chandrayaan-1's first picture of the Moon. Credit: ISRO

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UPDATE: The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced on 11/12 that the 100 km science orbit has been successfully achieved. Congrats to the Chandrayaan-1 team!

India’s space agency released the first picture of the Moon taken by the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. While it’s not a superlative image, as Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society blog says, it is a milestone. Emily also explained that this photo has a resolution more than 3,000 times poorer than the eventual science images will have because the camera on Chandrayaan-1 was designed to take images from an a 100-kilometer science orbit (this image was taken on Nov. 4 at 311,200 kilometers away from the Moon). And today, the spacecraft got closer to that final science orbit by firing its engines for 31 seconds, reducing its perigee (nearest distance to the moon) from 187 km to 101 km.

Chandrayaan-1’s orbit is still elliptical, and its apogee (farthest distance from the moon) is now 255 km. In this orbit, Chandrayaan-1, takes two hours and nine minutes to go around the Moon. On Wednesday evening, the Spacecraft Control Centre at Bangalore will issue commands for the spacecraft to fire its engines again to reduce the apogee to 100 km, putting the spacecraft into its final science orbit.

Then, on either Nov. 14 or 15, the Moon Impact Probe will be released. It weighs 35 kg, and once released will take about 25 minutes to impact. It will hit a pre-selected location (Chandrayaan-1 Twitter says to keep an eye on Shackleton Crater), and the primary objective is to demonstrate the technologies required for landing the probe at a desired location on the Moon and to qualify some of the technologies related to future soft landing missions.

Sources: ISRO, The Hindu

November 11, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

When Moons and Rings Collide

Saturn's moon Prometheus collides with the F Ring. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

This is absolutely astounding! The Cassini spacecraft captured a collision between Saturn’s moon Prometheus and the F ring, which creates a “streamer;” material being pulled from the ring by the moon’s gravity, leaving behind a dark channel. There’s even a movie of the event! The creation of these streamers and channels occurs in a cycle that repeats during each of Prometheus’ orbits. During its 14.7 hour orbit of Saturn, when Prometheus reaches apoapse, or where it is farthest away from Saturn and closest to the F ring, the oblong moon draws a streamer of material from the ring. But since Prometheus orbits faster than the material in the ring, this new streamer is pulled from a different location in the ring about 3.2 degrees (in longitude) ahead of the previous one. In this way, a whole series of streamer-channels is created along the F ring, and Cassini has captured more images showing what are called streamer-channels.

New images, as the one below, again look at the streamer-channels. This image looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 36 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on September 30, 2008. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 970,000 kilometers (602,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-ring-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 45 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel.

Streamers and channels. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute"

In some observations, 10 to 15 streamer-channels can easily be seen in the F ring at one time (at left). Eventually, a streamer-channel disappears as shearing forces (i.e., Keplerian shear) act to disperse the constituent dust particles.

The movie shows just under half of a complete streamer-channel cycle. The dark frames in the movie represent the period during which Prometheus and the F ring pass through Saturn’s shadow. The images in the movie were acquired by the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on November 23 and 24, 2006. The movie sequence consists of 72 clear spectral filter images taken every 10.5 minutes over a period of about 12.5 hours.

Source: Cassini,

November 11, 2008December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Mystical Surprise: Spitzer Sees Quartz Crystals In Planetary Disks

Crystals (insets) found in planetary disks. Credit: Caltech

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The Spitzer Space Telescope has, for the first time, detected tiny quartz-like crystals sprinkled in young planetary systems. This surprises astronomers, because these crystals, which are types of silica minerals called cristobalite and tridymite, require flash heating events, such as shock waves, to order to form. So what is going on in these planetary disks to create this type of materials? The findings suggest that shock waves from swirling gas and dust are responsible for creating the stuff of planets throughout the universe. “Spitzer has given us a better idea of how the raw materials of planets are produced very early on,” said William Forrest of the University of Rochester, N.Y “By studying these other star systems, we can learn about the very beginnings of our own planets 4.6 billion years ago.” The big question is, though, with these crystals, can astronomers foretell the future? (Just kidding)

Planets are born out of swirling pancake-like disks of dust and gas that surround young stars. They start out as mere grains of dust swimming around in a disk of gas and dust, before lumping together to form full-fledged planets. During the early stages of planet development, the dust grains crystallize and adhere together, while the disk itself starts to settle and flatten. This occurs in the first millions of years of a star’s life.

When Forrest and his colleagues used Spitzer to examine five young planet-forming disks about 400 light-years away, they detected the signature of silica crystals. Silica is made of only silicon and oxygen and is the main ingredient in glass. When melted and crystallized, it can make the large hexagonal quartz crystals often sold as mystical tokens. When heated to even higher temperatures, it can also form small crystals like those commonly found around volcanoes.

It is this high-temperature form of silica crystals, specifically cristobalite and tridymite, that Forrest’s team found in planet-forming disks around other stars for the first time. “Cristobalite and tridymite are essentially high-temperature forms of quartz,” said Sargent. “If you heat quartz crystals, you’ll get these compounds.”

In fact, the crystals require temperatures as high as 1,220 Kelvin (about 1,740 degrees Fahrenheit) to form. But young planet-forming disks are only about 100 to 1,000 Kelvin (about minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit to 1,340 Fahrenheit) — too cold to make the crystals. Because the crystals require heating followed by rapid cooling to form, astronomers theorized that shock waves could be the cause.

Shock waves, or supersonic waves of pressure, are thought to be created in planet-forming disks when clouds of gas swirling around at high speeds collide. Some theorists think that shock waves might also accompany the formation of giant planets.

So maybe astronomers will be able to predict the type of planets in this newly forming solar system!

The findings are in agreement with local evidence from our own solar system. Spherical pebbles, called chondrules, found in ancient meteorites that fell to Earth are also thought to have been crystallized by shock waves in our solar system’s young planet-forming disk. In addition, NASA’s Stardust mission found tridymite minerals in comet Wild 2.

Forrest and University of Rochester graduate student Ben Sargent led the research, which will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Source: Caltech