NASA's Cassini spacecraft took this latest picture of Saturn this week when it was 59.9 million kilometres away. The photo was taken using Cassini's BL1 broadband spectral filter. A full colour composite picture is built up by adding together images taken in the blue, red and green spectrums. Three of Saturn's moons can be seen in the image: Enceladus, Mimas, and Rhea. Cassini will be releasing new images once a week until it reaches Saturn in July 2004.
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When they look at Io, one of Jupiter's moons, researchers think they could be seeing that the Earth might have looked like in its early history, before the development of plate tectonics - 200 to 500 million years after the planet formed. Volcanically active Io is being constantly pulled by Jupiter and another of its moons, Europa, so plate tectonics have never taken hold. On Earth, volcanic hotspots form at the edges of plates, but on Io they are circular.
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Beginning tonight, and lasting for about two weeks, all five planets visible to the unaided eye will be in the sky - a nighttime planetary grouping that won't be back again until 2036. To get the best view, head somewhere with a clear view to the Western horizon (you should still be able to see all the planets, even from a light-polluted urban environment). Mercury is just above the horizon (near the Moon tonight), Venus is the bright star high in the Western sky, Mars is a reddish star just above Venus, Saturn is almost directly overhead, and Jupiter is the brightest object in the Eastern sky.
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A Boeing Delta II rocket launched the 50th Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite on Saturday. The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 1753 UTC (12:53 pm EST), after a brief delay because of a problem with the upper stage's nitrogen system. The Lockheed Martin-built satellite joins 27 others already in orbit, to provide navigational information to both civilians and the military.
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Billionaire Paul Allen has committed $13.5 million to support the construction of the first and second phases of the Allen Telescope Array. Construction of the array is now underway at the Hat Creek Observatory, 466 km northeast of San Francisco; the first phase will include the development of 32 6.1-metre radio telescopes. The second phase will see an additional 174 built. Eventually there will be a total of 350 identical dishes built. Once the first 32 dishes are completed, the array can begin scientific operations.
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While watching the night sky with its panoramic camera, NASA's Spirit rover saw something surprising - a streak of light that was probably the brightest object in the sky. But what was it? It could have been a meteorite, or an old, dead spacecraft that orbited overhead. Based on the direction of the trail, the only spacecraft in that orbit, moving at that velocity would be Viking 2.
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Scientists think they have an explanation for the "dust bowl" droughts of the 1930s, which helped to cause the Great Depression in the United States. Using a climate model called NASA's Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction Project (NSIPP), researchers were able to see how unusual temperatures in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans could divert the path of the jet stream, which normally dumps rain in the US Great Plains. This lack of water created a feedback loop which reinforced the drought, which is why it lasted for nearly a decade.
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NASA's Opportunity rover has determined that the small mineral spherules, which scientists have been calling "blueberries", contain hematite. This furthers the theory that the region was once drenched with liquid water. On Earth, hematite crystals with the same size as the spherules usually form in a wet environment. Doing a chemical analysis on the spherules was difficult because they're too small for any of Opportunity's instruments. The rover had to find a spot which was covered with spherules to analyze.
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Make sure you keep your eyes turned to the night sky for the next couple of weeks - you'll be able to see all five planets visible to the unaided eye. Mercury is down near the Western horizon, and sets quickly after sunset. Venus is also the West, and the brightest object in the sky after the Moon. Mars is a small reddish star above Venus. Saturn is nearly directly overhead, and Jupiter is the next brightest object, low in the Eastern horizon after sunset. You won't need a telescope to see them all, but if you can get your hands on one, you're in for an even better view.
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NASA and the US Department of Energy announced this week that they will be working together to develop a nuclear reactor system for space exploration. One goal for this partnership will be to develop the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) mission, which will visit and examine Jupiter's three icy moons. The reactor will provide the electricity for a high-powered ion engine, which will allow JIMO to get into orbit around each moon and then out again.
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The ESA's Mars Express has confirmed that water ice exists at Mars' southern pole. Astronomers have known for years that the northern cap contained water ice, but the chemical analysis of the south pole only showed carbon dioxide. Observations from the spacecraft's OMEGA instrument showed that both carbon dioxide and water ice are present in the southern cap. Mars Express will use another instrument, MARSIS, to determine how thick the ice caps are to help calculate just how much water ice is present.
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The closest asteroid ever recorded to pass by the Earth was discovered on Monday evening by NASA's LINEAR asteroid survey. Asteroid 2004 FH, which is only 30 metres across, will fly past the Earth at a distance of only 43,000 km - well within the orbit of the Moon. Objects of this size are believed to pass the Earth once every two years or so, but they're usually undetected. 2004 FH will make its closest approach at 2208 UTC (5:08 pm EST), and should be visible to areas of Europe and Asia with binoculars.
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When NASA's Stardust spacecraft flew through the tail of Comet Wild-2, it took some of the most detailed images ever seen of a comet. Analysts have taken a short exposure of the comet's surface and overlaid it onto a longer exposure that showed the comet's jets. This combined image allows scientists to understand which surface features are creating the jets, to better understand why Wild-2 is so incredibly pockmarked with craters, rifts and holes. Stardust will return to Earth in 2006 with its precious cargo of cometary particles.
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The ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory has resolved the diffuse glow from the heart of the Milky Way into hundreds of individual sources, solving a mystery that has stumped astronomers for more than 30 years. Astronomers believed that the gamma ray glow came from the interactions of atoms, but this couldn't explain why the glow was so strong. Integral was able to see the individual celestial objects, and the data suggests that they might be binary systems, where a black hole or neutron star is orbiting another star.
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Space tourism company Space Adventures announced this week that they're shopping around for a potential spaceport location. They're considering sites around the world, and the facility would include a launch pad (or runway) for sub-orbital flights, a spaceflight training centre, and other activities. Space Adventures has already taken over 100 reservations for sub-orbital flights; they just need a vehicle.
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New research funded by NASA indicates that some models of climate change might be overestimating what impact water vapour will have in raising average temperatures. This new study, based on data gathered by the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS), verified that water vapour increases in the atmosphere as surface temperatures rise, but not as much as previously theorized. Water vapour is a significant greenhouse gas, so this new research will help scientists make much better predictions about future climate changes.
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The NASA/ESA Ulysses spacecraft's power is starting to run down, and soon it won't have enough to keep itself warm. When the spacecraft was first launched in 1990 to study the Sun, its reactor produced 285 watts of power, but now almost 14 years later, it's down to 207 watts. If it gets too much lower, the spacecraft won't be able to operate the heaters that keep the fuel flowing. Without this fuel, it won't be able to orient its main antenna towards the Earth to transfer data.
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Oxygen is one of the most important elements on Earth to life, and it comprises a fifth of our atmosphere. It's a volatile element, so it can't exist in large quantities unless something, like life, is continually producing it. The mainstream view is that plants evolved oxygen photosynthesis early on, and then produced large amounts of oxygen. Another view, tested under laboratory conditions, is that when volcanic rocks weather, they release oxygen into the atmosphere. Perhaps it's a combination of these factors that built up our oxygen.
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NASA's Spirit rover has taken a beautiful panoramic image of the Bonneville crater. Here's a 1024x768 wallpaper of the crater. The original image was quite wide, covering 180-degrees, so it doesn't quite fit a computer screen normally - this image has been cropped a bit. Spirit recorded this photo on March 12, 2004, using its panoramic camera. By taking such a detailed image, scientists can get a good idea about the surface material at the crater.
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A Russian Proton rocket successfully launched the Eutelsat W3A satellite into orbit Monday evening. The Proton lifted off at 2306 UTC (6:06 pm EST), and the Breeze M upper stage separated 10 minutes later, placing the satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit 9 hours later. The W3A satellite will provide broadband, direct-to-home, and other communications services to Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
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The ESA/NASA SOHO spacecraft took a beautiful picture of an enormous prominence, 700,000 kilometres across, ejected from the surface of the Sun. An "eruptive prominence" is a mass of relatively cool plasma - only 80,000 C, instead of 1-2 million C in the upper atmosphere of the Sun. These are usually associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs), and can affect the Earth's magnetosphere when they come our way.
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One of the largest astronomy catalogs ever created was released to the public today by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The released data contains six terabytes of images and catalogs, containing 88 million celestial objects and detailed spectra on 350,000 objects. Many discoveries have been made with previously released SDSS data, including the most distant quasars, coolest stars, properties of galaxies, and the locations of many asteroids. The photographs were taken using the SDSS' 2.5 metre telescope, which records images digitally using 5 filters.
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More than a million people die from malaria every year, a disease spread by mosquitoes. Epidemics happen when environmental conditions, like rainfall, temperature and vegetation are perfect for the disease carrying insects. By tracking these changes with satellites, NASA scientists hope to be able to predict when and where disease outbreaks will happen to give people some warning. This would help relief agencies know where conditions are going to be the worst so they can direct their efforts.
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A new object has been discovered in the Solar System; it's nearly as large as Pluto, but 13 billion kilometres away. Tentatively named Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the Sea, it's approximately 1,700 km in diameter, which makes it the largest Solar System object found since Pluto was located in 1930. Sedna is located in the Kuiper Belt, and follows a highly ecliptic orbit that takes 10,500 years to complete. The object was first discovered using the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, and then confirmed with several other instruments, including the Spitzer Space Telescope.
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One of the most innovative aspects of the Mars Pathfinder and Exploration Rover missions were the durable airbags which helped the spacecraft survive a hard landing on the surface of Mars. Instead of having to slow their descent from parachute speed, they could carry much less fuel... and bounce. But developing the airbags was a significant engineering challenge. How to create a fabric that could survive a long fall, across sharp rocks, which wouldn't clog up the lander when it deflated. Engineer Tommaso Rivellini explains the journey to create the airbag system which became so successful.
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A Lockheed Martin-built Atlas III rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral on Saturday, lofting the MBSAT communications satellite into orbit - the rocket lifted off at 0540 UTC (12:40am EST). MBSAT will provide a range of telecommunications services to countries in Asia. This was the second Atlas flight this year, and 70th consecutive success for the family of rockets.
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Still more than 100 days before it enters Saturn's orbit, NASA's Cassini spacecraft is delivering great data back to Earth. This week's images released from the spacecraft show clumps embedded within its narrow, outermost F ring. Two images were taken roughly two hours apart when the spacecraft was 62.9 million kilometres away. Clumps like this were seen when the Voyager spacecraft flew past Saturn, but scientists haven't had the chance to watch them for a long time - now they'll have years to keep an eye on them.
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NASA's Spirit rover took the first ever image of the Earth from the surface of another planet (other than the Moon). The photo was taken one hour before sunrise on Spirit's 63rd day on the surface of Mars. The image was built up from a series of images that Spirit took of the sky, as well as a panoramic image directly of Earth. The contrast was doubled to make the Earth easier to see; although, it's still a little hard to make out.
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The Santa Ana winds, which blow across Southern California, are known to cause dry, fire-hazard conditions inland. But new data gathered by NASA's Quiksat satellite and its SeaWinds instrument shows that these same winds can help stimulate the marine environment. The strong winds blow from the land out to the ocean and cause cold water to rise up from the bottom of the ocean, bringing nutrients to the surface. Quiksat was able to measure the winds, a drop in ocean temperature, and a rise in chlorophyll offshore.
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After being on the road for several weeks, NASA's Spirit rover has finally reached the edge of the crater "Bonneville". The rover made a total journey of 335 metres to reach the crater, but it did stop to analyze a few rocks along the way. This crater doesn't have exposed rocks on its edge, like the one that Opportunity landed in, but there are some interesting rock features on the far side that scientists would like to analyze. During night, Spirit took images of the sky, including the constellation Orion.
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Even through NASA has begun moving to implement US President Bush's new space initiative; the plan hasn't gotten full support from Washington lawmakers yet. Two members of the House Science Committee, Sherwood Boehlert and Bart Gordon, expressed their concerns about the plan during a hearing on Wednesday, with all the unanswered questions about budget, affordability, and its impact on other science and astronautics programs.
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With all this attention on Spirit and Opportunity, it's easy to forget that robotic exploration of Mars is just getting started. NASA has plans for several more missions in the works, taking advantage of the launch windows that happen every two years. Next up: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is due to launch in 2005. It will take images of the Martian surface at a resolution small enough to see a beach ball. 2007 will see the launch of Phoenix, which will put a lander on the surface to search for organic molecules and water in the Martian soil. And then the Mars Science Laboratory is due to launch in 2009, which will be a rover the size of a minivan, designed to crawl the surface for up to two years.
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The European Space Agency announced its decision today for the two asteroids that Rosetta will fly past on its way to meet up with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The first target is Steins, which is fairly small; only a few kilometres across - Rosetta will pass it by 1,700 km on Sept. 5, 2008. The second asteroid is Lutetia; a 100 km asteroid which Rosetta will pass within 3,000 km on July 10, 2010. Rosetta will then reach Comet 67P/CG in 2014.
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The Earth's early oceans looked much different than today's, according to researchers from the University of Rochester; they were probably devoid of oxygen for a billion years longer than previously thought. Most geologists believe that the oceans had no oxygen for the first two billion years, and have been oxygen-rich for the last 500 million, but the time in between was a mystery. The team studied rocks that were on the floor of an ancient ocean, one billion years ago, and found that it was still oxygen poor at that time.
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One long term goal to help the expansion of humans into space would be to terraform the planet Mars to make it more Earthlike. This would be planetary engineering on the largest scale, taking hundreds of years and requiring an immense amount of resources. Researcher Omar Pensado Diaz believes the best way to terraform Mars would be to do it piece-by-piece, creating Earthlike regions instead of trying to do the whole planet at once.
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Caltech and Cornell have begun a $2 million study to build a 25-metre telescope in the Atacama desert of northern Chile. The telescope will observe the sky in the submillimeter spectrum, which will allow it to see objects which don't emit much visible or infrared light. This would be a significant improvement over the 10.4-metre instrument that Caltech already operates, giving up to 12 times the light gathering power. If construction of the instrument goes ahead, it should be completed by 2012.
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New NASA-funded research has revealed how bone loss from long-duration spaceflight can increase the risk of injury to astronauts. A research team used three-dimensional X-ray scans to study the bones in 14 US and Russian crewmembers of the International Space Station. They found that the astronauts lost up to 2.7% of their bone mass every month, and additional exercise would be necessary to decrease the loss. This research will also help study the loss of bone density in the elderly.
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When Opportunity sent back the first images from the surface of Mars, there was a strange object that puzzled amateurs and scientists alike - it looked like a bunny. After some analysis, scientists agreed that the object was probably about 4-5 cm long. Later images showed that the object had moved with the wind, ending up underneath the rover. This has led observers to believe that it's a piece of the rover's airbag that tore off and has been drifting around the crater, pushed by the wind.
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NASA's Mars rovers stopped looking down for a bit to watch the Sun. Specifically, they were looking to see Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, make transits across the face of the Sun. Opportunity watched the smaller moon Deimos (14 km) pass in front of the Sun on March 4, and then larger Phobos (27 km long) make a transit on March 7 - in both cases, the transits lasted less than a minute. These images will help scientists better calculate the orbits and shape of the Martian moons.
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Last week, NASA announced with much fanfare that Opportunity had found evidence that the region of Mars was once drenched with water. But it turns out, NASA's other rover, Spirit, has found quietly evidence as well, but using completely different clues. The rover found cracks inside a rock dubbed "Humphrey", which look like they are minerals crystallized out of water. The amount of water that could create this is far less than the amount that acted on Opportunity's landing site, demonstrating that Mars probably had a diverse climate in the past.
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The newly-launched Spitzer Space Telescope revealed the Henize 206 nebula, located 163,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The nebula was created when a supermassive star exploded as a supernova millions of years ago. The star had shed layers of material over a long period, and with the force of the explosion, the material collected together to create new stars - the nebula has hundreds and possibly even thousands of young stars, which range in age from two to ten million years old.
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New images of Saturn taken by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory show that X-ray emissions, which are reflected radiation from the Sun, come mainly from its equator. This is unusual, because existing theories predict that they should come from the planet's poles, as has been observed with Jupiter. Another unusual discovery is that the planet's rings aren't visible at all in the X-ray spectrum.
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A group of scientists from Washington University in St. Louis found nine specks of silicate stardust inside a primitive meteorite, after examining more than 159,000 particles. This is an important discovery, because it tells researchers that the early solar system formed from gas and dust, and not in a hot solar nebula - until now, these silicate particles had only been found in interplanetary dust. The team used a special mass spectrometer to analyze the composition of individual grains in the meteorite, searching for particles which had to be formed in stars.
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Tom Hanks' production company, Playtone, is set to create a new IMAX film based on the Apollo missions. The film will be called "Magnificent Desolation", and is supported by NASA and sponsored by Lockheed Martin. It will take audiences to the Ocean of Storms, the Fra Mauro Highlands, the Sea of Tranquility and the Taurus Littrow Valley. The previous space-based IMAX film, "Space Station", grossed over $70 million at the box office and it still playing in theatres.
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The US House of Representatives today approved bill H.R. 3752, The Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004. This bill gives the FAA authority to license commercial suborbital launches, such as the vehicles being developed by groups competing to win the X-Prize. This should make it easier for companies to test new kinds of reusable suborbital vehicles. The bill will now go to Senate for consideration before it becomes law.
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Using data from NASA's Aqua satellite, scientists have found that the smoke from burning vegetation can inhibit the formation of clouds. Until now, scientists thought that smoke particles could serve to cool the planet by shading the surface and reflecting light back into space, but this effect seems less than estimated. In fact, wherever there's smoke, cloud cover is significantly reduced, so light reaches the surface and is absorbed by the Earth, creating a warming effect.
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