Spaceports rule! These are one end of our tenuous link with outer space. At one time literary sculptors crafted imaginary sites to blast people up, up and away. Now, hard cold engineering makes them real. A handful of working spaceports dot the Earth’s surface. Cape Canaveral is one with the longest history and Joel Powell, with Art LeBrun, show off its illustrious heritage in their book, ‘Go For Launch – An Illustrated History of Cape Canaveral’. In it is a glowing tribute to a little tract of land in Florida that was transfigured from swamp land into launch site.
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Podcast: More Evidence for the Big Bang
Last week’s episode started out with a bang… a Big Bang. This week we continue our discussion into the beginning of everything. We present three additional lines of evidence that have led astronomers to the conclusion that our Universe started out as a singularity 13.7 billion years ago, and has been expanding ever since.
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Colliding Spiral Galaxies Captured by Hubble
This Hubble photograph shows two spiral galaxies colliding together. Known as the Antenna Galaxies, aka NGC 4038-4039, these two galaxies started interacting a few hundred million years ago. Thanks to the galactic interaction, perturbed gas clouds in both galaxies collapse into regions of furious star formation (these are the blue regions). Most of these regions will disperse their stars into galactic disks, but some will remain on as super star clusters – similar to the globular star clusters we see in our Milky Way.
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What’s Up this Week: October 16 – October 22, 2006
Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! As dark skies return at a sane hour, we’ll spend this week checking in on galactic star clusters and nebulae. No scope? No problem! The brilliant Venus is back just before dawn and the week ends with one of the year’s most reliable meteor showers. So turn an eye towards the sky, because…
Here’s what’s up!
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Gas Bubble Photo Wins NRAO Prize
A beautiful photograph taken by Jayanne English and Jeroen Stil has won a $1,000 prize from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The photograph shows a dusty bubble of gas blown inside the gas disk of the Milky Way. This galactic shell’s, officially known as GS 62.1+0.2-18, is located about 30,000 light-years from Earth. The bubble is sculpted by the powerful interstellar winds and radiation from a few dozen massive, hot stars.
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Astronauts Relocate Soyuz Spacecraft
The crew of Expedition 14 took a short ride outside the station last week when they repositioned a Soyuz capsule on the International Space Station. They undocked from the Zvezda port, and then redocked to the Zarya module about 20 minutes later. This Soyuz shuffling was necessary to prepare for the arrival of a new Russian Progress cargo ship, later this month.
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Mars Express Sees Water’s History on the Red Planet
Most of humanity’s Mars-bound fleet of spacecraft is searching the Red Planet for evidence of its watery past. New evidence gathered by ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft is helping scientists fine tune their theories. A radar instrument on the spacecraft has turned up water ice in Mars’ upper layers; a mineral mapping instrument has discovered chemicals formed in a wet environment; and its powerful camera has picked out obvious features on the surface of Mars formed by running water. Here’s a breakdown of what Mars Express has found so far.
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Astrophoto: Swan Song for a Comet
On December 2, 1995, the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft was launched aboard an Atlas/Centaur rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Station on a two-year mission to monitor the sun. Almost eleven years later, the SOHO spacecraft continues to faithfully record solar activity orbiting the Sun about 1.5-million kilometers inward from Earth. NASA and the European Space Agency operate the satellite jointly. Everyday, SOHO transmits pictures that are freely available for viewing on the Internet. These images inform scientists around the world about the Sun’s nature and behavior. Its images and data enable them to predict “space weather” events affecting our planet. Earlier in July of this year, someone discovered a new comet in a SOHO picture and now it’s gracing our evening skies as seen in this telescopic image.
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String of Pearls in Saturn’s Atmosphere
This Cassini photograph shows a strange line of white dots in a line across the atmosphere in Saturn’s northern latitudes. The image was made using Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, and the line of dots are clearings in Saturn’s cloud system. There are more than two dozen of these clearings, spaced apart by about 3.5 degrees in longitude. Scientists think they might be caused by a large cloud formation or wave that encircles the whole planet.
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New Telescope Will Search for Asteroids and Map Out the Universe
A newly built observatory on Maui is getting ready to release a flood of astronomical data. The 1.8 metre Pan-STARRS telescope will perform an automated search for asteroids that threaten the Earth. While it’s searching for asteroids, the telescope will also build up one of the most detailed maps of our surrounding Universe. Researchers will use this data to create a 3-dimensional map of galaxies and dark matter, and measure the properties of the dark energy accelerating the expansion of the Universe.
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