Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Please (Again)– Mars Will NOT Look As Big As the Full Moon

Mars. Credit: NASA

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I thought this year would be different and finally I could make it through the month of August without receiving a forwarded email from an excited acquaintance, wondering if I knew about this incredible news that will happen only once in a lifetime. The email claims Mars is coming closer to Earth and will look as big as the full moon!

Please, this is a complete falsehood and entirely not true. The email about this “once in a lifetime event” has been circulating like clockwork every August for the past five years and is full of errors. If you don’t believe me, here are Universe Today articles dubunking this erroneous email in 2007, 2006, and 2005. If you don’t believe Fraser, Phil Plait the Bad Astronomer debunks the email here, here , here, and here’s the original one back in 2003. I don’t know if the general public really is so uneducated/gullible/in the dark to fall for this every year, or if the folks who start circulating this email every year are trying to determine how uneducated/gullible/in the dark the world actually is.

This began in August 2003 when Mars actually did make its closest approach to Earth in the past 60,000 years. On August 27th, 2003, Mars was 55,758,006 kilometers (34,646,418 miles) away from Earth. Mars just looked like a bright “star” in the sky, not much different than how it usually looks to the naked eye whenever the two planets are at their closest approach. The view of Mars in a telescope was a little better than usual back in 2003, as the bigger telescopes could see the ice caps a little clearer, and possibly some other features. Someone got some bad information as to how big Mars would look at this closest approach and got excited about this bad information, then sent said bad information out in an email which spread like wildfire through the wonders of email forwarding.

This year in August, Mars is about 360 million kilometers (about 215 million miles) from Earth, not very close at all. Since Mars and the Earth are in different orbits around the Sun, and they each take different amounts of time to go around the sun (Earth 365 days, Mars 687 Earth days) the distance between the two planets grows and shrinks, with the closest approaches occurring about every 26 months. But the distance changes with every approach because of the way celestial mechanics works.

If you still need more info, NASA has a page debunking this email, too. Please, let’s work hard to let everyone know this Mars email is completely wrong so that we don’t have to write this article again next year.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Videos of NASA/ATK Rocket Failure

NASA launch officials were forced to hit the “destruct” button on an experimental rocket that launched early Friday morning. The launch and subsequent explosion was captured on both amateur and NASA video, and shows the pieces falling back to Earth.

The countdown and initial takeoff Friday morning from a NASA launch facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, went smoothly, said former astronaut Kent Rominger, a vice president in ATK’s (Alliant Tech Systems) launch systems division. “Then (the rocket) appeared to veer south,” he said. To the naked eye the flight didn’t appear to be in trouble, he said, but it was moving off course.

The rocket was a little more than 2 miles high when it was destroyed. A team of officials from NASA and ATK are investigating the incident.

Here’s the amateur video:

Continue reading “Videos of NASA/ATK Rocket Failure”

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Spitzer Takes Family Portrait of Stars Amid Another “Celestal Geode”

Generations of stars amid a gas cavity. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

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A new image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope reveals generations of stars amid a cavity carved from a colorful cosmic cloud. The striking infrared picture shows a region, called W5, which is similar to N44F, or the “Celestial Geode” that was discussed in a Universe Today article last week. The gas cavity, which looks similar to a geode-like cavity found in some rocks, is carved by the stellar wind and intense ultraviolet radiation from hot stars. W5 is studded with stars of various ages, and provides new evidence that massive stars – through their brute winds and radiation – can trigger the birth of new stars.

The image was unveiled today at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles as part of Spitzer’s five-year anniversary celebration. Spitzer launched on August 25, 2003, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. A high-resolution version of the image is available here. It shows a family history full of life and death. But are the deaths of some stars responsible for the birth of new stars?

“Triggered star formation continues to be very hard to prove,” said Xavier Koenig of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. “But our preliminary analysis shows that the phenomenon can explain the multiple generations of stars seen in the W5 region.”

The most massive stars in the universe form out of thick clouds of gas and dust. The stars are so massive, ranging from 15 to about 60 times the mass of the Sun, that some of their material slides off in the form of winds. The scorching-hot stars also blaze with intense radiation. Over time, both the wind and radiation blast away surrounding cloud material, carving out expanding cavities.

Astronomers have long suspected that the carving of these cavities causes gas to compress into successive generations of new stars. As the cavities grow, it is believed that more and more stars arise along the cavities’ expanding rims. The result is a radial “family tree” of stars, with the oldest in the middle of the cavity and younger and younger stars farther out.

The astronomer who last week explained the N44F image, Dr. You-Hua Chu from the University of Illinois, said along the walls of the cavity there are dust pillars sticking out and young stars are being formed at the tips of these pillars. Similar features are seen in the new Spitzer image of W5, where younger stars (seen as pink or white in the image) are embedded in the elephant-trunk-like pillars as well, and also beyond the cavity rim. The most massive stars (seen as blue dots) are at the center of two hollow cavities.

With Spitzer’s infrared vision, Koenig and his colleagues peered through the dusty regions of W5 to get a better look at the stars’ various stages of evolution and test the triggered star formation theory. The results from their studies show that stars within the W5 cavities are older than stars at the rims, and even older than stars farther out past the rim. This ladder-like separation of ages provides some of the best evidence yet that massive stars do, in fact, give rise to younger generations.

“Our first look at this region suggests we are looking at one or two generations of stars that were triggered by the massive stars,” said co-author Lori Allen of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “We plan to follow up with even more detailed measurements of the stars’ ages to see if there is a distinct time gap between the stars just inside and outside the rim.”

Another version of the image, taken with Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera.
Another version of the image, taken with Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera.

Millions of years from now, the massive stars in W5 will die in tremendous explosions. When they do, they will destroy some of the young nearby stars – the same stars they might have triggered into being.

W5 spans an area of sky equivalent to four full moons and is about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. The Spitzer picture was taken over a period of 24 hours. The color red shows heated dust that pervades the region’s cavities. Green highlights the dense clouds, and white knotty areas are where the youngest of stars are forming. The blue dots are older stars in the region, as well as other stars in the background and foreground.

A paper on the findings will appear in the December 1, 2008, issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Source: Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Podcast: Gravity

Topics about Gravity
Earth's Gravity Map

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You seem to like a nice series, so here’s a new one Fraser and Pamela have been thinking about. Over the course of the next 4 weeks, they’re going to cover each of the basic forces in the Universe. And this week, they’re going to start with gravity; the force you’re most familiar with. Gravity happens when masses attract one another, and we can calculate its effect with exquisite precision. But you might be surprised to know that scientists have no idea why gravity happens

Click here to download the episode

Or subscribe to: astronomycast.com/podcast.xml with your podcatching software.

Gravity Show notes.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Rocket Explodes With NASA Experiments on Board

This ATK rocket exploded shortly after liftoff on Friday. Credit: Jacob Owen | NASA Wallops Flight Facility

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Update: NASA said at a press conference this morning that launch officials were forced to destroy the rocket less than 30 seconds after it’s 5:10 a.m. launch. The rocket had veered off-course, although they couldn’t say how far, and they had to terminate the flight at about 12,000 feet.

A suborbital rocket carrying experiments conducted by NASA exploded early Friday morning 27 seconds after launch on Wallops Island in Virginia. The ATK (Alliant Tech Systems) rocket lifted off with no apparent problems at 5:10 a.m. NASA said no property damage or injuries have occurred, but there were conflicting reports as to whether debris had been sighted on land. NASA said it believes that most of the debris landed in the Atlantic Ocean.

NASA said the debris potentially could be hazardous. People who spot debris are being asked to call Wallops Emergency Operations Center at 757-824-1300.

“NASA is very disappointed in this failure but has directed its focus on protecting public safety and conducting a comprehensive investigation to identify the root cause,” the agency said in a statement. NASA is assembling a multidiscipline team, along with ATK of Salt Lake City, Utah to begin the investigation promptly.

The payload was a 5-in-1 experiment on hypersonic flight, air breathing engines and a rocket recovery system.

Source: NASA

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Ride a Maglev Rocket to Space Hotel in 2012

Space Spa on Galactic Suite Hotel. Credit: Galactic Suite

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The space tourism company Galactic Suite already has 38 reservations made by tourists who, the company says, in 2012 will travel on board a magnetically levitated spacecraft to an orbiting luxury hotel, complete with a floating spa, pictured here. The trip, which costs 3 million Euros, will provide four days in orbit 450 kilometers above the earth and includes 18 weeks of training on a Caribbean island for the tourists to prepare for their spaceflight. The Galactic Suite Spaceport is being built on the island and features the first maglev rocket where the spacecraft will accelerate to speeds up to 1,000 km/h (620 mph) in 10 seconds and lift off from a vertical runway.

Galactic Suite Spaceport. Credit: Galactic Suite
Galactic Suite Spaceport. Credit: Galactic Suite

After reaching approximately the speed of sound, the spaceship will detach from its maglev carrier and accelerator, and will ascend to orbit using rocket or air-breathing engines. The maglev accelerator will then brake to a stop and return to its starting point for the next launch. The launch track will be about 3 kilometers long.

According to Xavier Claramunt and Marsal Gifra, founders of Galactic Suite, “Maglev launch assist technology will enable space tourists to travel to our space resorts in orbit on a commercial basis. The most expensive part of any space travel to low-Earth orbit is the first few seconds – getting off the ground. This technology is cost competitive with other forms of space transportation, environmentally friendly and inherently safe”.

The stay at the hotel will “offer a mixed programme of reflection and exercise to seize the unique physical conditions encountered in space,” said Claramunt.

One of the most innovative experiences that tourists can experience is the bathroom in zero gravity. Galactic Suite has developed the space spa. Inside the spa, tourists can float with 20 liters of water bubbles. According to Galactic Suite materials, “The tourist, already trained to avoid the effects of water in a state of weightlessness, can play with the bubble dividing it into thousands of bubbles in a never-ending game. In addition, the transparent sphere may be shared with other guests.”

Galactic Suite is a private space tourism company, founded in Barcelona in 2006. The company hopes to make space tourism available to the general public and “will combine an intensive program of training astronauts to relax with a programme of activities on a tropical island as a process preparation to space travel.”

Source: Galactic Suite press release

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Real Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Solar System on the Way

A NASA image of asteroid Eros (left) and Robert Gaskell's shape model of the asteroid (right). Credit: PSI

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Thinking about trekking across Titan or meandering around Mercury? Along with your backpack and towel, you’ll also want to pack one of Robert Gaskell’s maps. Gaskell, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, is working on creating real hitchhiking guides to the various bodies in our solar system. He’s been equated to the final frontier what Lewis and Clark were to the American West – the guy producing the most accurate and detailed maps available. And thanks to current space missions sending back loads of data, Gaskell is beginning to work on creating precise maps of Mercury, the asteroid Eros, and eight moons of Saturn including Enceladus. Gaskell has created sophisticated software that combines hundreds of spacecraft images of varying resolution to create the maps. He’s been developing the software for nearly 25 years, and if you want to map a planet, moon, or asteroid, he’s the guy to ask.

Gaskell uses a method called stereo-photo-clinometry, or SPC. Just as stereo-phonic means sound from different directions, stereo-photo means light from different directions, and clinometry means that slopes, or inclines, are being measured. So SPC means finding slopes from the way the surface looks under different illuminations, and once we know the slopes we can find the heights.

Four computers in Gaskell’s office grind out mapping data nearly 24/7. But despite his quarter century of mapping work, Gaskell says he’s just getting started. “There are thousands of objects in the solar system, and so far, I’ve barely scratched the surface, if you’ll pardon the expression,” he said.

Gaskell has won an NASA Exceptional Achievement medal for his detailed maps of the asteroid Itokawa.

Robert Gaskell. Credit: PSI
Robert Gaskell. Credit: PSI

His newest project will create highly accurate maps of the entire surface of Mercury based on images sent back by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft. MESSENGER flew by Mercury in January and will fly by again in October before going into orbit of Mercury in 2011.

Currently Gaskell is combining images from the January flyby with those taken by Mariner 10, which visited Mercury in 1973, to produce initial maps. But the sun angle for the Mariner 10 photos was the same for three flybys and so far there is only one flyby for MESSENGER.

“It won’t be until we get overlapping data from different sun directions that it will really start making a lot of sense,” Gaskell said. “It does give a reasonable solution now, but I don’t completely trust it.”

Gaskell’s maps not only give scientists useful information about a body’s surface, they also can be used for navigating spacecraft, calibrating spacecraft instruments, and gaining information about the geology, internal structure and past history of an object.

In addition to Mercury, Gaskell is mapping eight of Saturn’s moons, including Enceladus, a frigid world punctuated by icy geysers. In October, NASA may use those maps as navigational tools to plot – and possibly adjust – the Cassini spacecraft’s trajectory as it flies past Enceladus.

Once Gaskell’s computers produce maps covering an entire body, they yield a very accurate image of the object’s shape. The moons of Saturn, for instance, have changed orbits during their history and gravitationally interact with one another. Once their shape became fixed, it recorded the tidal stresses at the time they froze, which gives scientists a way of determining the orbital history of the system.

For Io, Jupiter’s highly volcanic moon, mapping its shape provides planetary geologists with part of the data they need to determine what processes may be going on inside its fluid core, which is being heavily torqued by the giant planet’s intense gravitational field.

Describing himself as an evangelical stereo-photo-clinometrist, he is sharing his work with others and recruiting more researchers into the long-term effort to map the solar system. Some of those are at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, The University of Arizona, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and USGS.

With so many planets, moons and asteroids to explore and map, “It’s like being in a big candy shop,” Gaskell said.

Source: Planetary Science Institute

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Changing How Scientists – and the Public – Do Astronomy

The 2.5 meter SDSS telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Credit: SDSS

Recently we’ve had articles on Universe Today that have discussed the outer Milky Way Galaxy, dark matter, and the discovery of a new minor planet. These articles have a common thread: The discoveries all come from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). If you aren’t familiar with SDSS, it encompasses a comprehensive survey lasting more than eight years, which has so far covered more than one-quarter of the sky.

Using a dedicated 2.5 meter telescope equipped with a 125- megapixel digital camera and spectrographs that can observe 640 stars and galaxies at a time, the SDSS has created terabytes of data that include thousands of deep, multi-color images. It’s also measured the distances to nearly one million galaxies and over 100,000 quasars to create the largest ever three-dimensional maps of cosmic structure.

The SDSS archive represents a thousand-fold increase in the total amount of data that astronomers have collected to date. But almost equally impressive is the easy-to-use interface that allows anyone in the world to access the SDSS data online. Whether you are a research astronomer looking for information to help solve a cosmological puzzle or an armchair astronomy enthusiast who just likes looking at pretty pictures of the universe, SDSS is at your disposal.

Astronomers gathered in Chicago earlier this week to celebrate the accomplishments and look ahead to the future of SDSS. “What amazes me is the huge range of the discoveries that have come from SDSS data,” said SDSS-II Director Richard Kron, an astronomer at the University of Chicago and Fermilab. “We designed it primarily as a survey to map the distribution of galaxies and quasars, but it’s also had a huge impact on the study of stars, the structure of our own Galaxy, and even solar system objects.”

SDSS has found new dwarf companion galaxies to the Milky Way, confirmed Einstein’s prediction of cosmic magnification, and observed the largest known structures in the universe. The new survey, SDSS-III, will continue to expand our horizons with new studies of the structure and origins of the Milky Way Galaxy and the nature of dark energy.

SDSS was undertaken to update the database of information about the sky with current technology. The previous comprehensive guide to the heavens was the Palomar Sky Survey that was conducted in the 1950’s and used glass photographic plates to store the data.

Not only has SDSS updated the technology, but it has changed the way astronomers do business. Astronomers who are doing research or have a question can look at the existing data in SDSS rather than having to pore through the sky, taking their own data with hard-to-get telescope time.

Dr. Pamela Gay, professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and host of the Astronomy Cast podcast said SDSS not only helps her research, but enhances her work in the classroom. “It’s a wonderful project,” she said. “I’m at a small state university and while I did my dissertation on galaxies, when I landed at a state school, I thought I’d never be able to do this (study galaxies) again because I don’t have access to a large telescope. But because of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and because of the easy to use tools where I can say to my undergraduate students, ‘go find all the data on these clusters,’ it’s possible for people at small schools to do amazing, amazing research and explore the entire universe.”

SDSS also powers the popular Galaxy Zoo website, where anyone in the world can help classify galaxies via the internet. From the work done by the public from their home computers, Galaxy Zoo has submitted peer reviewed research articles to astronomical journals.

Visit the SDSS website to take a look at the images and discoveries made possible by this comprehensive survey. The Sky Server interface on the SDSS website provides the tools you need to start perusing the universe, and has educational activities for teachers and students as well.

Jim Gunn, SDSS Project Scientist from Princeton University, who has guided the project since its inception said that more than any single discovery, he is proud of the quality and scope of the SDSS data sets. “Visible light is where we understand the universe best, but when we began the SDSS, there were no sensitive, well characterized, visible-light catalogs that covered a large area of sky,” he said. “Now we have multi-color images of 300 million celestial objects, 3-dimensional maps and detailed properties of well over a million of them, and it’s all publicly available online. That changes everything.”

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Phoenix Lander: The Digging Continues

This mosaic of images shows the Phoenix worksite. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/U of Arizona

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Scientists and engineers from NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander continue with digging operations around the lander with the spacecraft’s robotic arm. They are looking for new materials to analyze and are examining the soil and ice subsurface structure. “We expect to use the robotic arm heavily over the next several weeks, delivering samples to our instruments and examining trench floors and walls to continue to search for evidence of lateral and vertical variations in soil and ice structures,” said Ray Arvidson, Phoenix’s “dig czar,” from Washington University in St. Louis. New trenches opened recently and shown in the image here include the “Burn Alive 3” trench in the eastern portion of the arm’s reachable workspace.

The team is excavating one side of this trench down to the ice layer and plans to leave about 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) of soil above the ice on the other side. From this intermediate depth is where scientists hope to test a sample of soil in Phoenix’s Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA).

Near the western end of the arm’s workspace, the team plans to dig as deep as possible in the “Cupboard” excavation area to study properties of the soil and ice in one of the polygon trough areas. Like on Earth, the polygon patterns form in areas of permafrost that goes through cycles of swelling and shrinking as the ground thaws and refreezes.

A sample from the Cupboard area may be delivered to the lander’s wet chemistry lab, part of the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA) to test for the presence of salts. In addition, the robotic arm will try to acquire ice-rich soil from “Upper Cupboard” and observe the material in the arm’s scoop to determine whether the sample sublimates. Melting is an indication of the presence of salt. If the sample melts and leaves behind a salty deposit, “Upper Cupboard” would be the location for the next sample for the wet chemistry lab. If no salts are detected, the team would
continue with plans to use the “Stone Soup” trench for acquiring the next wet chemistry lab sample.

If you’re wondering about the interesting names of the different areas, the team names the areas and trenches to make identification easier (instead of saying something like “that trench in the upper left corner of the image taken on Sol 45.”) The names are chosen from various fairy tales and myths.

A change has taken place for the scientists and engineers working with Phoenix. They are now working on Earth time instead of Mars time. This eliminates the constantly transitioning work period as a Mars sol is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. Undoubtedly, this has to make their lives much easier, instead of juggling their Earth life and Mars work every day.

Daily activities are being planned for the spacecraft as the lander performs activities that were sent up the previous day. Digging and documenting are done on alternate days to allow the science team time to analyze data and adjust activities accordingly.

In upcoming sols, the team plans to scrape the “Snow White” trench and experiment with acquiring and holding samples in the shade versus the sun. They want to find out if prolonged exposure to sunlight causes the acquired material to stick to the scoop, as has occurred with previous samples.

Source: Phoenix News site

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Is This Black Hole Available in Size Medium?

Can Medium Sized Black Holes be Found in Globular Clusters? Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ NOAO/AURA/NSF

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Black holes are sometimes huge – supermassive as they are called, billions of times the mass of our sun. Other times they are petite with just a few times the sun’s mass. But do black holes also come in size medium? A new study suggests that, most likely, the answer is no. Astronomers have long suspected that the best place to find a medium-mass black hole would be at the core of a miniature galaxy-like object called a globular cluster. Yet nobody has been able to find one conclusively. And now, a team of astronomers has thoroughly examined a globular cluster called RZ2109 and determined that it cannot possess a medium black hole, leading researchers to believe that black holes don’t come in medium, or at most are very rare.

“Some theories say that small black holes in globular clusters should sink down to the center and form a medium-sized one, but our discovery suggests this isn’t true,” said Daniel Stern of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Stern is second author of a study detailing the findings in the Aug. 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal. The lead author is Stephen Zepf of Michigan State University, East Lansing.

Black holes are incredibly dense points of matter, whose gravity prevents even light from escaping. The least massive black holes known are about 10 times the mass of the sun and form when massive stars blow up in supernova explosions. The heftiest black holes are up to billions of times the mass of the sun and lie deep in the bellies of almost all galaxies.

That leaves black holes of intermediate mass, which were thought to be buried at the cores of globular clusters. Globular clusters are dense collections of millions of stars, which reside within galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars. Theorists argue that a globular cluster should have a scaled down version of a galactic black hole. Such objects would be about 1,000 to 10,000 times the mass of the sun, or medium in size on the universal scale of black holes.

The research team used the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to look at the spectrum of the cluster, which revealed that the black hole is petite, with roughly 10 times the mass of our sun.
According to theory, a cluster with a small black hole cannot have a medium one, too. Medium black holes would be quite hefty with a lot of gravity, so if one did exist in a globular cluster, scientists argue that it would quickly drag any small black holes into its grasp.

“If a medium black hole existed in a cluster, it would either swallow little black holes or kick them out of the cluster,” said Stern. In other words, the small black hole in RZ2109 rules out the possibility of a medium one.

The researchers believe other globular clusters would have a similar makeup and the likelihood for finding a medium black hole is not good. Zepf said it is possible such objects are hiding in the outskirts and of galaxies like our Milky Way, either in surrounding so-called dwarf galaxies or in the remnants of dwarf galaxies being swallowed by a bigger galaxy. If so, the black holes would be faint and difficult to find.

News Source: JPL