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This image from the front Hazcam on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the rover's drill in place during a test of whether the rock beneath it, "Bonanza King," would be an acceptable target for drilling to collect a sample. Subsequent analysis showed the rock budged during the Aug. 19, 2014, test. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Evaluation of a pale, flat Martian rock as the potential next drilling target for NASA's Curiosity Mars rover determined that the rock was not stable enough for safe drilling.
The rock, called "Bonanza King," moved slightly during the mini-drill activity on Wednesday, at an early stage of this test, when the percussion drill impacted the rock a few times to make an indentation.
Instead of drilling that or any similar rock nearby, the team has decided that Curiosity will resume driving toward its long-term destination on the slopes of a layered mountain. It will take a route skirting the north side of a sandy-floored valley where it turned around two weeks ago.
"We have decided that the rocks under consideration for drilling, based on the tests we did, are not good candidates for drilling," said Curiosity Project Manager Jim Erickson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "Instead of drilling here, we will resume driving toward Mount Sharp."
After the rover team chooses a candidate drilling target, the target is subjected to several tests to check whether it meets criteria for collecting a drilled sample without undue risk to rover hardware. The mission's previous three drilling targets, all at more extensive outcrops, met those criteria.
Bonanza King is on the northeastern end of "Hidden Valley." Earlier this month, Curiosity began driving through the valley, but the rover slipped in the sand more than anticipated.
"After further analysis of the sand, Hidden Valley does not appear to be navigable with the desired degree of confidence," Erickson said. "We will use a route avoiding the worst of the sharp rocks as we drive slightly to the north of Hidden Valley."
The rover has driven about 5.5 miles (8.8 kilometers) since landing inside Gale Crater in August 2012, and has about 2 miles (3 kilometers) remaining to reach an entry point to the slopes of Mount Sharp, in the middle of the crater.
The mission made important discoveries near its landing site during its first year by finding evidence of ancient lake and river environments. The rover's findings indicated that those environments would have provided favorable conditions for microbes to live. NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project continues to use Curiosity to assess ancient habitable environments and major changes in Martian environmental conditions. The destinations on Mount Sharp offer a series of layers that recorded different chapters in the environmental evolution of early Mars.
JPL, a division of Caltech, built the rover and manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
The regions around supermassive black holes shine brightly in X-rays. Some of this radiation comes from a surrounding disk, and most comes from the corona, pictured here in this artist's concept as the white light at the base of a jet. This is one possible configuration for a corona -- its actual shape is unclear. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has captured an extreme and rare event in the regions immediately surrounding a supermassive black hole. A compact source of X-rays that sits near the black hole, called the corona, has moved closer to the black hole over a period of just days.
"The corona recently collapsed in toward the black hole, with the result that the black hole's intense gravity pulled all the light down onto its surrounding disk, where material is spiraling inward," said Michael Parker of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, United Kingdom, lead author of a new paper on the findings appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
As the corona shifted closer to the black hole, the gravity of the black hole exerted a stronger tug on the X-rays emitted by it. The result was an extreme blurring and stretching of the X-ray light. Such events had been observed previously, but never to this degree and in such detail.
Supermassive black holes are thought to reside in the centers of all galaxies. Some are more massive and rotate faster than others. The black hole in this new study, referred to as Markarian 335, or Mrk 335, is about 324 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the Pegasus constellation. It is one of the most extreme of the systems for which the mass and spin rate have ever been measured. The black hole squeezes about 10 million times the mass of our sun into a region only 30 times the diameter of the sun, and it spins so rapidly that space and time are dragged around with it.
Even though some light falls into a supermassive black hole never to be seen again, other high-energy light emanates from both the corona and the surrounding accretion disk of superheated material. Though astronomers are uncertain of the shape and temperature of coronas, they know that they contain particles that move close to the speed of light.
NASA's Swift satellite has monitored Mrk 335 for years, and recently noted a dramatic change in its X-ray brightness. In what is called a target-of-opportunity observation, NuSTAR was redirected to take a look at high-energy X-rays from this source in the range of 3 to 79 kiloelectron volts. This particular energy range offers astronomers a detailed look at what is happening near the event horizon, the region around a black hole from which light can no longer escape gravity's grasp.
Follow-up observations indicate that the corona is still in this close configuration, months after it moved. Researchers don't know whether and when the corona will shift back. What's more, the NuSTAR observations reveal that the grip of the black hole's gravity pulled the corona's light onto the inner portion of its superheated disk, better illuminating it. Almost as if somebody had shone a flashlight for the astronomers, the shifting corona lit up the precise region they wanted to study.
The new data could ultimately help determine more about the mysterious nature of black hole coronas. In addition, the observations have provided better measurements of Mrk 335's furious relativistic spin rate. Relativistic speeds are those approaching the speed of light, as described by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
"We still don't understand exactly how the corona is produced or why it changes its shape, but we see it lighting up material around the black hole, enabling us to study the regions so close in that effects described by Einstein's theory of general relativity become prominent," said NuSTAR Principal Investigator Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. "NuSTAR's unprecedented capability for observing this and similar events allows us to study the most extreme light-bending effects of general relativity."
NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Virginia. Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech, JPL, the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, New York, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, the Danish Technical University in Denmark, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, ATK Aerospace Systems in Goleta, California, and with support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Science Data Center.
NuSTAR's mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, with the ASI providing its equatorial ground station located in Malindi, Kenya. The mission's outreach program is based at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California. NASA's Explorer Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society study is online at:
This artist's concept shows the Voyager 1 spacecraft entering the space between stars. Interstellar space is dominated by plasma, ionized gas (illustrated here as brownish haze), that was thrown off by giant stars millions of years ago. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech › Full image and caption
August 21, 2014
Media and the public are invited to attend two events Monday, Aug. 25 from 10 a.m. - noon PDT (1-3 p.m. EDT) to learn more about the agency's New Horizons mission to Pluto and its historic connection to the Voyager spacecraft's visit to Neptune in 1989.
The events, which will air live on NASA Television and the agency's website, will take place in the Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters, 300 E Street SW in Washington.
New Horizons will conduct a six -month-long study of Pluto and its five moons, including a close approach in July 2015.
- The 10-11 a.m. PDT (1-2 p.m. EDT) event will feature a panel discussion with:
- Jim Green, director, NASA's Planetary Division, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, Washington
- Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
- Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado
- The 11 a.m.-noon PDT (2-3 p.m. EDT) event will include several New Horizons science team members giving personal accounts of their work during the Voyager Neptune encounter and their new assignments on the Pluto mission. Panel participants include:
- Moderator: David Grinspoon, Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona
- Fran Bagenal, University of Colorado, Boulder
- Bonnie Buratti, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
- Jeffrey Moore, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California
- John Spencer, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado
Media and the public can also ask questions via social media using #askNASA.
For NASA TV streaming video, schedules and downlink information, visit:
NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft gave humanity its first close-up look at Neptune and its moon Triton in the summer of 1989. Like an old film, Voyager's historic footage of Triton has been "restored" and used to construct the best-ever global color map of that strange moon. The map, produced by Paul Schenk, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, has also been used to make a movie recreating that historic Voyager encounter, which took place 25 years ago, on August 25, 1989.
The new Triton map has a resolution of 1,970 feet (600 meters) per pixel. The colors have been enhanced to bring out contrast but are a close approximation to Triton's natural colors. Voyager's "eyes" saw in colors slightly different from human eyes, and this map was produced using orange, green and blue filter images.
In 1989, most of the northern hemisphere was in darkness and unseen by Voyager. Because of the speed of Voyager's visit and the slow rotation of Triton, only one hemisphere was seen clearly at close distance. The rest of the surface was either in darkness or seen as blurry markings.
The production of the new Triton map was inspired by anticipation of NASA's New Horizons encounter with Pluto, coming up a little under a year from now. Among the improvements on the map are updates to the accuracy of feature locations, sharpening of feature details by removing some of the blurring effects of the camera, and improved color processing.
Although Triton is a moon of a planet and Pluto is a dwarf planet, Triton serves as a preview of sorts for the upcoming Pluto encounter. Although both bodies originated in the outer solar system, Triton was captured by Neptune and has undergone a radically different thermal history than Pluto. Tidal heating has likely melted the interior of Triton, producing the volcanoes, fractures and other geological features that Voyager saw on that bitterly cold, icy surface.
Pluto is unlikely to be a copy of Triton, but some of the same types of features may be present. Triton is slightly larger than Pluto, has a very similar internal density and bulk composition, and has the same low-temperature volatiles frozen on its surface. The surface composition of both bodies includes carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen ices.
Voyager also discovered atmospheric plumes on Triton, making it one of the known active bodies in the outer solar system, along with objects such as Jupiter's moon Io and Saturn's moon Enceladus. Scientists will be looking at Pluto next year to see if it will join this list. They will also be looking to see how Pluto and Triton compare and contrast, and how their different histories have shaped the surfaces we see.
Although a fast flyby, New Horizons' Pluto encounter on July 14, 2015, will not be a replay of Voyager but more of a sequel and a reboot, with a new and more technologically advanced spacecraft and, more importantly, a new cast of characters. Those characters are Pluto and its family of five known moons, all of which will be seen up close for the first time next summer.
Triton may not be a perfect preview of coming attractions, but it serves as a prequel to the cosmic blockbuster expected when New Horizons arrives at Pluto next year.
In another historic milestone for the Voyager mission, Aug. 25 also marks the two-year anniversary of Voyager 1 reaching interstellar space.
The Voyager mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, manages the New Horizons mission for NASA's SMD.
For more information about the Lunar and Planetary Institute, visit:
Artist’s conception of the internal environment of the moon. Credit: NAOJ
Rather than being dead inside, the Moon still has a warm interior that is due to the effect of the Earth’s gravity on our closest major celestial neighbor, a new study says. The results came after looking at results from the SELENE (SELenological and ENgineering Explorer) spacecraft as well as other missions exploring the Moon.
“I believe that our research results have brought about new questions. For example, how can the bottom of the lunar mantle maintain its softer state for a long time? To answer this question, we would like to further investigate the internal structure and heat-generating mechanism inside the Moon in detail,” stated Yuji Harada, the principal investigator of the research team.
“Another question has come up: How has the conversion from the tidal energy to the heat energy in the soft layer affected the motion of the Moon relative to the Earth, and also the cooling of the Moon?” he added. “We would like to resolve those problems as well so that we can thoroughly understand how the Moon was born and has evolved.”
A diagram of the moon’s interior showing its viscosity (the thickness of its interior liquid) as well as parameters of its internal density. Credit: NAOJ
Clues to the Moon’s interior come from examining how the Earth’s gravity deforms its inside through tidal forces. Models show that tidal changes within the moon are likely due to a “soft layer” deep within the lunar mantle. Scientists learned that the Moon has a core (inner portion, made up of metal) and a mantle (made up of rock) through the Apollo missions, which saw astronauts deploy seismic devices that revealed the interior structure.
“The previous studies indicated that there is the possibility that a part of the rock at the deepest part inside the lunar mantle may be molten. This research result supports the above possibility since partially molten rock becomes softer,” the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan stated. “This research has proven for the first time that the deepest part of the lunar mantle is soft, based upon the agreement between observation results and the theoretical calculations.”
Researchers believe the heat occurs in a soft layer that is deep within the mantle, and not throughout the entire Moon. They said that possible future research directions could include why it is only this layer that remains soft, and how tidal energy changes the Moon’s cooling and its relative motion to Earth.
An artist’s conception of a neutron star and a white dwarf having been thrown far from their host galaxy. Once well outside the galaxy, they merge to produce the Universe’s loneliest supernovae. Credit: Mark A. Garlick / space-art.co.uk / University of Warwick
It’s hard to comprehend the vast emptiness of space. Especially when we detect odd signatures, such as luminous explosions that are neither as bright nor as long as traditional supernovae, originating in the unfathomable emptiness.
But a team of astronomers is now beginning to understand these so-called calcium-rich transients, often referred to as the Universe’s loneliest supernovae, hypothesizing that they’re created by collisions between white dwarf stars and neutron stars — both of which have been thrown out of their galaxy.
“One of the weirdest aspects is that they seem to explode in unusual places. For example, if you look at a galaxy, you expect any explosions to roughly be in line with the underlying light you see from that galaxy, since that is where the stars are” said lead author Joseph Lyman from the University of Warwick in a press release. “However, a large fraction of these are exploding at huge distances from their galaxies, where the number of stellar systems is miniscule.”
The team guessed there could be very faint dwarf galaxies, hiding beneath the limit of detection, but found nothing with our best telescopes, namely the Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Hubble Space Telescope.
“So the question becomes, how did the get there?” pondered Lyman. Roughly a third of these events occur at least 65 thousand light-years away from a potential host galaxy.
We’ve discovered dozens of so-called hypervelocity stars — single stars that escape their home galaxy, traveling rapidly throughout intergalactic space — and even one runaway globular cluster. Nature clearly has a way of kicking systems out of an entire galaxy, likely by an interaction with the supermassive black hole lurking in the center of that galaxy.
So it’s viable that the source of these supernovae was first kicked out of its host galaxy. But the second puzzle wondered what type of system could have caused such an odd explosion.
Previous studies show that calcium comprises up to half of the material thrown off in these transients, compared to only a tiny fraction in normal supernovae. It remained unclear how to explain such a calcium-rich system.
So the research team compared their data to short-duration gamma ray bursts, which are also seen to explode in remote locations with no coincident galaxy detected. We think these enigmatic bursts occur when two neutron stars collide, or when a neutron star merges with a black hole.
Alas, the research team discovered that if a neutron star collided with a white dwarf, the explosion would not only provide enough energy to generate the low luminosity of the calcium rich transients, but it would also produce calcium rich material.
“What we therefore propose is these are systems that have been ejected from their galaxy,” said Lyman. “A good candidate in this scenario is a white dwarf and a neutron star in a binary system. The neutron star is formed when a massive star goes supernova. The mechanism of the supernova explosion causes the neutron star to be ‘kicked’ to very high velocities (100s of km/s). This high velocity system can then escape its galaxy, and if the binary system survives the kick, the white dwarf and neutron star will merge causing the explosive transient.”
Any merger should also produce high-energy gamma-ray bursts, motivating further observations of any new examples.
The paper has been published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online.
The annual Perseid meteor shower radiates from a point in the constellation Perseus just below the W of Cassiopeia. Rates are usually about 100-120 meteors per hour from a dark, moonless sky at peak but will be cut in half due to moonlight this year. This map shows the sky facing east around midnight Aug. 12-13. Source: Stellarium
Get ready for the darling of meteor showers this week — the Perseids. Who can deny their appeal? Not only is the shower rich with fiery flashes of meteoric light, but the meteors come in August when the weather’s couldn’t be more ideal. Peak activity is expected Tuesday night, Aug. 12-13, when up to 100 meteors an hour might be seen.
Ah, but there’s a rub. This year the moon will be only two days past full and radiant enough to drown out the fainter shower members. We’re more likely to see something like 30 meteors an hour, maybe fewer. But all it takes is one bright meteoric flash to make it all worthwhile. That’s been my experience. Nothing gets the heart pumping like a bright Perseid and the anticipation of the next. While more meteors are surely more exciting, it’s not a number thing, but the experience of the raw event that makes all the difference. Sure beats sitting in front of a computer screen or watching the latest rerun of The Big Bang Theory, right?
A fine Perseid flashes straight out of the radiant on August 12 last year. The two bright dots above the start of the trail form the well-known Perseus Double Cluster. Credit: Bob King
Find a place away from glaring lights to allow your eyes to adapt to the darkness. That way you’ll see more meteors. While the Perseids spit out the occasional fireball, most shower members are going to be closer in brightness to the stars of the Big Dipper. Some leave “smoke” trails called meteor trains. They’re actually tubes of glowing air molecules created as the meteoroid particles speed through the atmosphere at 130,000 mph. Though ‘shooting stars’ can look surprisingly close by, they typically burn up 60-70 miles overhead.
Perseid meteors radiate from the constellation Perseus (hence the name) located a short distance below the “W” of Cassiopeia in the northeastern sky. To know for sure if you’ve seen the genuine item and not a random meteor, follow the trail backward — if it points toward the northeast, you’ve got a ringer!
A remarkable orbital view of a Perseid (right, center) burning up in Earth’s atmosphere photographed by astronaut Ron Garan on Aug. 13, 2011. The star Arcturus is directly above the bright trail. Credit: Ron Garan / ISS Expedition 28 crew / NASA
You can watch for Perseids all week long, but peak activity begins Tuesday evening and continues through dawn Wednesday. The later you stay up, the more meteors you’ll spot because the radiant or point in the sky from which the meteors appear to radiate rises higher with every hour. The higher the radiant, the fewer meteors that get cut off by the horizon.
Composite of bright Perseid meteors recorded by NASA all-sky cameras in 2011. Each is a grain of rock shed from the tail of comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. Every year in mid-August, Earth passes through the comet’s debris trail as it orbits around the sun. Credit: NASA
The observing equipment you were born with and a comfortable chair are all you need to make the most of the event. OK, it’s nice to have a friend along, too, to share the ‘wow’ moments and keep from falling asleep. Sometimes I’m too lazy to haul out a chair and instead sprawl out on the deck or grass. Others prefer their Perseids from a steaming hot tub.
A 2010 Perseid meteor streaks over the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Credit: ESO
Left-behind sand, seed and pebble-sized particles from comet 109P/Swift-Tuttleare responsible for all the fun. Discovered in 1862, the comet circles the sun every 120 years. Over millennia, 109P has left a stream of debris along its orbit, which the Earth passes through every year in mid-August. Comet grit hits our atmosphere like bugs smacking a car’s windshield and vaporizes in a flash of light called meteor or shooting star.
Normally I’d recommend facing east or southeast to watch the shower, but with the moon dominating that direction, look off to the northeast, north or southwest to keep that old devil moonlight out of view. Even a little dark adaption will help boost your Perseid count. Once you’re situated, sit back, look up and enjoy each and every sparkler that drops from the sky. Oh, and don’t forget to take in the big picture. The sky’s a giant calendar that begins with the mid-summer constellations at nightfall and advances through the fall stars to the onset of winter with the rising of Orion at dawn. Let the months fall away as the Earth turns you toward the sun.
An illustration from the new Citizen Science web site “A Spacecraft for All” showing the ISEE-3 trajectory around the Earth, Moon and Sun. (Credits: Google Creative Labs, Skycorp Inc., Space Exploration Engineering)
The journey began on August 12, 1978 from Cape Canaveral on a Delta II launch vehicle. Now after 36 years and 30 billions miles of travel around the Sun — as well as a crowd-funded reboot of the spacecraft and a foiled attempt to put it into Earth orbit — the ISEE-3 has completed a return visit to the Earth-Moon system.
The spacecraft made its closest approach to the Earth on August 9 and flyby of the Moon, August 10, 2014. Closest approach was 15,600 km (9693 miles) from the Moon’s surface. With the lunar flyby, Skycorp, Inc. of Mountain View, California, with help from Google Creative Labs, has announced a revised mission for ISEE-3 to deliver science to the public domain.
ISEE-3 has marked several important milestones and achievements for NASA over the five decades in which it has traveled and monitored the particles and fields between the Earth and the Sun. Its latest milestone – returning to Earth, was planned and refined over 30 years ago. However, with NASA no longer interested in recovering the spacecraft because of the limitations of its present budgets, its impending return would be with no fanfare, no commanding, no recovery into Earth orbit and no new mission. With the news that NASA could not afford a recovery, space enthusiasts began to talk. Retired and active aerospace engineers began to exchange ideas with avid HAM radio operators around the World. Finally, one group took charge. They revived the vintage spacecraft and has now designed a new mission for the it.
NASA illustration of the ISEE-3 fly by the Moon, 1982. On August 10, 2014, ISEE-3 will fly within 15,600 km (9693 miles) above the Moon’s surface.
Enter Dennis Wingo and Austin Epps of Skycorp, Inc. Residing in an abandoned McDonald’s drive-thru on Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, they began a journey in March to recover the spacecraft. First off, before any recovery attempt could be undertaken, it required original documentation, so Dennis with assistance from Keith Cowing began contacting original ISEE-3 engineers, calling, knocking on NASA doors and finally began signing NASA space act agreements to have the documents released into their possession. And what fascinating documents they were.
Written long before the internet, before the first personal computers and when computer punch cards and main frames were the means to program and command spacecraft, most of the ISEE-3 documents resided as printed documents only, on none other than paper, yellowing and old, doomed to eventually rot away in modest storage rooms. Some had been converted to the modern archive format, Adobe’s PDF file format. This was the beginning of revival of a working knowledge to command the spacecraft. It was very sketchy but in about 90 days, documents appeared, documents were scanned to PDFs, searched and the team prepared for the recovery attempt.
Key personnel of the ISEE-3 Reboot Project. From left, Casey Harper, Cameron Woodman, Austin Epps, Jacob Gold, Balint Seeber, Keith Cowing, Dennis Wingo, Marco Colleluori and Ken Zin. (Photo credit, Google Creative Labs)
The team grew rapidly and as the Beatles song goes, Skycorp got by with a little help from their friends. Actually, a lot of help from their friends. First, there was a crowd funding effort. Thousands of individuals from around the globe contributed to a final crowd funding purse of about $160,000. This is in contrast to the $100 million or much more that is required to reach just the launch date of a NASA mission.
Next, the people that had been exchanging comments on blogs (e.g. Planetary blog post on ISEE-3) began making themselves available, no charge, providing decades of accrued experience in spacecraft design and operation and other very relevant expertise. There were original NASA engineers, Robert Farquhar and David Dunham, Warren Martin, Bobby Williams, and Craig Roberts. HAM radio operators appeared or were contacted from as far as England (AMSAT-UK), Germany(Bochum Obs.) and as nearby as the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. All this expertise, working knowledge and capable hardware had to converge very rapidly. By the latter half of May, they were ready.
The operators of the venerable Arecibo Radio Telescope offered their expertise and its 1000 foot radio dish for communication purposes. And an absolutely critical solution was found to replace the lack of any existing transmitter that could communicate with the old 40 year old technology. NASA had retired and scrapped the original Deep Space Network equipment. So technology developed by Ettus Research Corp. of Santa Clara, California was identified as a possible replacement for the non-existent transmitter. Ettus proposed a combination of open source software called Gnu Radio configured to work with Ettus developed Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) platforms as the solution. With the Skycorp team constructing the command sequences, Ettus engineers Balint Seeber and a former engineer John Marlsbury rigged the critical substitute for a hardware transmitter and with the expertise to modulate and demodulate a radio signal, a trip to Puerto Rico and the Arecibo dish was undertaken in May.
After two weeks of some waiting on hardware and trial and error, there was success. Two-way communication was achieved and ISEE-3 truly became ISEE-3 Reboot. Further hiccups unfolded by trial and error, learning to command and receive with still less than complete working knowledge. More NASA space act agreements were necessary to permit the access to achieve success. Finally, NASA provided time on the Deep Space Network, the famous Goldstone radio dish and others in the network, famous for communicating with Apollo missions and Voyagers at the edge of the Solar System. This provided further attempts at communication that helped to resolve and understand issues. Furthermore, a Bell Labs engineer, Phil Karn Jr. (KA9Q) volunteered his expertise in late night work sessions, to demodulate and decode the incoming radio signal, to convert analog signal into 1′s and 0′s. Phil provided crucial input and energy to the ISEE-3 Reboot at a key juncture.
The ultimate goal could now be attempted – command the spacecraft to fire its rocket engines to change its trajectory and become captured by the Earth’s gravitational field. Mike Loucks of Space Exploration Engineering and engineers of Applied Defense Solutions, Inc. worked quickly to provide trajectory information and revisions. Finally, commanding ISEE-3 to fire its rockets was attempted and then attempted again and again. Skycorp concluded that father time was what was truly in command of ISEE-3′s destiny. Thirty-six years in space had taken its toll and Skycorp engineers realized that the fuel tanks had lost pressure. They could command it in all necessary ways but the spacecraft could not squeeze the fuel out of the tanks.
Recovering from this disappointment, Skycorp has arrived at today with the help of the original engineers lead by Robert Farquhar of Goddard Space Flight Center, along with the thousands through crowd funding contributions and an incredible group of volunteers. And along the way, Google Creative Labs documented the adventure and created the compendium which was delivered to the public domain last week, A Spacecraft for All. This web site provides a graphic illustration of both the ISEE-3 timeline as well as its incredible journey to explore the Sun-Earth relationship, study two comets and then undertake a 30 year journey to return to Earth on August 10, 2014.
Using the radio telescope at Morehead State University, they will continue receiving the commanded telemetry stream from the remaining viable science instruments, process the data and present it to the public and to professional researchers alike for analysis. While ISEE-3 could not be recovered into an Earth orbit as Farquhar had hoped decades ago, it will continue its journey around the Sun and return to the vicinity of the Earth in 2029. How long telemetry from ISEE-3 can be received as it travels away from the Earth remains to be seen, and keeping in contact with it will be a challenge for its new operators in the months ahead.
The “super moon” of August 2014 captured by Expedition 40′s Oleg Artemyev on the International Space Station. Credit: OlegMKS / Twitter
With the full Moon approaching just a little bit closer than Earth to usual, a cosmonaut on the International Space Station took a few moments of his time to capture a few shots of it setting behind the Earth. Oleg Artemyev was just a shade closer to that Moon than the rest of us, and the sequence of pictures (below the jump) is stunning.
As Universe Today’s David Dickinson explained last week, the so-called “supermoon” refers to a phenomenon where the full Moon falls within 24 hours of perigee (closest approach to the Earth.) We’re in a cycle of supermoons right now, with this weekend’s the second in a three-part cycle this year.
The Moon appears about 14% bigger between its furthest and closest approaches to Earth. While the difference is subtle in the sky, it does produce higher tides on Earth (with an example being Hurricane Sandy in 2012.)
Technically the perigee happened August 10 at 6:10 p.m. UTC (2:10 p.m. EDT), but people (including Artemyev) took several pictures of the moon a bit before and after that time. One example from our Universe Today Flickr pool is at the bottom of this post. You can see more examples on Flickr.
An array of Earth-like planets. Image Credit: NASA
Since 1995, astronomers have detected thousands of worlds orbiting nearby stars, sparking a race to find the one that most resembles Earth. The discovery of habitable exoplanets and even extraterrestrial life is often referred to as the Holy Grail of science. So with the gold rush of exoplanet discoveries these days, it’s pretty tempting in news articles to lose readers in a fantastical narrative.
This month I’m launching a project on Beacon — a new independent platform for journalism — that will go behind the sensational headlines covering the search for Earth 2.0.
But I can’t do it without your help. In order to commit to writing about this on a regular basis, I need to raise $4,000 from subscribers who are willing to support my work over this month. Don’t worry, subscriptions are available for only $5 per month. This will supply the funding necessary to write for six months.
By Kepler’s definition, to be Earth-like a planet must be both Earth-size (less than 1.25 times Earth’s radius and less than twice Earth’s mass) and must circle its host star within the habitable zone: the band where liquid water can exist.
Image Credit: xkcd
This simple, and yet variant, definition is a crucial starting point. But one glance at our Solar System (namely Venus and Mars) demonstrates that just because a planet is Earth-like doesn’t mean it’s an Earth twin.
So even if we do find Earth-like planets, we still don’t have the ability to know if they’re water worlds with luscious green planets and civilizations peering back at us.
But should we scale our definition of Earth-like planets up or down? Examples in the Solar System suggest that we should scale it down. Maybe planets located nearer to the center of the habitable zone are more congenial to life.
But can we base our definition on a single example — even if it’s the only example we know — alone? Theoretical astronomers suggest the picture is much more complicated. Life might arise on larger worlds, ones up to three times as massive as Earth, because they’re more likely to have an atmosphere due to more volcanic activity. Or life might arise on older worlds, where there’s simply more time for life to evolve.
It’s a crucial debate in astronomy research today, and it’s one that the media needs to handle with care. I am proud to be a part of Universe Today’s team, bringing readers up-to-date with the on goings in our local Universe. And Beacon will allow me to spend even more time, focusing on such a critical topic.
For each article, I will gather news, opinions and commentary from astronomers in the field. Not only do I have training as an astronomer, but my graduate school research focused on detecting exoplanet atmospheres from ground-based telescopes. With this deep-rooted understanding of the field at hand, I am able to parse complex information by directly reading peer-reviewed journal articles and interviewing astronomers I’ve met through my previous research.
But I really do need your help. Subscriptions are available for only $5 per month, and there are special rewards — such as gorgeous astronomy photos printed on canvas and gift subscriptions for friends — for people who subscribe at higher levels. You can directly subscribe here.
But here’s the best part: when you subscribe to my work, you’ll get access not only to all the stories I write, but the work of over 100 additional writers, based all over the world. This month Beacon is launching a series of astronomy projects, including one by Universe Today writer Elizabeth Howell.
The supermoon of August 10, 2014 rising behind Mt. Rundle and Banff, Alberta, Canada as shot from the Mt. Norquay viewpoint looking south over the valley. Credit and copyright: Alan Dyer.
Wow! The astrophotographers out there are getting artsy! Take a look at some of the most artistic images of the full Moon we’ve seen yet. The August 10 full Moon was a so-called “super” Moon — and it was the “super-est” of a trio of full Moons being at perigee, or its closest approach to the Earth in its orbit. It was just 356,896 kilometers distant at 17:44 UTC, less than an hour from Full. You can see a comparison shot of the perigee and apogee Moons this year immediately below. Find all the technical details here, but enjoy a gallery of great images from around the world
A comparison the between two ‘extreme’ full Moons of 2014: the perigee Full Moon of August 10th, and the apogee full Moon of January 16. As seen from Central Italy. Credit and copyright: Giuseppe Petricca.
The August 10, 2014 ‘super’ Moon. Credit and copyright: Robbie Ambrose.
Supermoon timelapse composite on August 10 near the ship mast at Barnegat Light on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. Credit and copyright: FrankM301 on Flickr.
A cloudy look at the perigee Moon of August 10, 2014 along side the Desde el Obelisco, Malecón de Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Credit and copyright: Goku Abreu.
‘Super’ Moon, August 10, 2014, taken with Nikon D80 from Ottawa, Canada. Credit and copyright: Andrew Symes.
Super Moon (and a companion) rising over Brixton, South London. 10/08/2014. Credit and copyright: Owen Llewellyn.
Camaro and Full Moon – Aug 9, 2014.Taken from the Cairns Wharf in Australia at dusk using an iPhone 5. Three frames; two exposures each. Credit and copyright: Joseph Brimacombe.
It was prom night in Cairns… so the fancy cars were out. See Joseph’s other “prom supermoon” image here.
People watch the nearly ‘super’ Moon rise on August 9, 2014 near a lighthouse. Credit and copyright: Will Nourse.
Perigee Full Moon mosaic from August 10, 2014 (a first attempt at a mosaic!) Credit and copyright: Mary Spicer.
Perigee Moon rise over London on August 10, 2014. Credit and copyright: Sculptor Lil.
The perigee Moon from Toronto, Canada at 8:35 pm EDT. Credit and copyright: Rick Ellis.
A full Moon flyby, as seen from Paris, France. Credit and copyright: Sebastien Lebrigand.
Want to get your astrophoto featured on Universe Today? Join our Flickr group or send us your images by email (this means you’re giving us permission to post them). Please explain what’s in the picture, when you took it, the equipment you used, etc.
An artist’s conception of a swirling accretion disk around a black hole. Credit: NASA / Dana Berry / SkyWorks Digital
Black holes one billion times the Sun’s mass or more lie at the heart of many galaxies, driving their evolution. Although common today, evidence of supermassive black holes existing since the infancy of the Universe, one billion years or so after the Big Bang, has puzzled astronomers for years.
How could these giants have grown so massive in the relatively short amount of time they had to form? A new study led by Tal Alexander from the Weizmann Institute of Science and Priyamvada Natarajn from Yale University, may provide a solution.
Black holes are often mistaken to be monstrous creatures that suck in dust and gas at an enormous rate. But this couldn’t be further from the truth (in fact the words “suck” and “black hole” in the same sentence makes me cringe). Although they typically accumulate bright accretion disks — swirling disks of gas and dust that make them visible across the observable Universe — these very disks actually limit the speed of growth.
First, any infalling matter can only enter through the accretion disk. Second, as matter in an accretion disk gets close to the black hole, traffic jams occur that slow down any other infalling material. And third, as matter collides within these traffic jams, it heats up, generating energy radiation that actually drives gas and dust away from the black hole.
A star or a gas stream can actually be on a stable orbit around the black hole, much as a planet orbits around a star. So it is quite a challenge for astronomers to think of ways that would make a black hole grow to supermassive proportions.
Luckily, Alexander and Natarajan may have found a way to do this: by placing the black hole within a cluster of thousands of stars, they’re able to operate without the restrictions of an accretion disk.
Black holes are generally thought to form when massive stars, weighing tens of solar masses, explode after their nuclear fuel is spent. Without the nuclear furnace at its core pushing against gravity, the star collapses. While the inner layers fall inward to form a black hole of only about 10 solar masses, the outer layers fall faster, hitting the inner layers, and rebounding in a huge supernova explosion. At least that’s the simple version.
The erratic path of the black hole through the gas (black line) is randomized by the surrounding stars (yellow circles). Meanwhile, dense cold gas (green arrows) flows toward the center of the cluster (red cross). Credit: Weizmann Institute of Science.
The team began with a model of a black hole, created from this stellar blast, embedded within a cluster of thousands of stars. A continuous flow of dense, cold, opaque gas fell into the black hole. But here’s the trick: the gravitational pull of many nearby stars caused it to zigzag randomly, preventing it from forming an accretion disk.
Without an accretion disk, not only is matter able to fall into the black hole from all sides, but it isn’t slowed down in the accretion disk itself.
All in all, the model suggests that a black hole 10 times the mass of the Sun could grow to more than 10 billion times the mass of the Sun by one billion years after the Big Bang.
While Comet ISON’s breakup around Thanksgiving last year disappointed many amateur observers, its flight through the inner solar system beforehand showed scientists something neat: it was carrying organic materials with it.
A group examined the molecules surrounding the comet in its coma (atmosphere) and, along with observations of Comet Lemmon, created a 3-D model that you can see above. Among other results, this revealed the presence of formaldehyde and HNC (hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon). The formaldehyde was expected, but the spot where HNC was found came as a surprise.
Scientists used to think that HNC is produced from the nucleus, but the research revealed that it actually happens when larger molecules or organic dust breaks down in the coma.
“Understanding organic dust is important, because such materials are more resistant to destruction during atmospheric entry, and some could have been delivered intact to early Earth, thereby fueling the emergence of life,” stated Michael Mumma, a co-author on the study who is director of the Goddard Center for Astrobiology. “These observations open a new window on this poorly known component of cometary organics.”
Comet ISON was one of the two comets studied by scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The diagram shows where it was located in the solar system at the time of observations. 3-D images of its coma (atmosphere) revealed organic compounds. Credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF); NASA/ESA Hubble; M. Cordiner, NASA, et al.
Observation were made possible using the powerful Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The array of 66 radio telescopes in Chile allows astronomers to map molecules and peer past dust clouds in star systems under formation, among other things. ALMA was completed last year and is the largest telescope of its type in the world.
The array’s resolution allowed scientists to probe for these molecules in moderately bright comets, which is also new. Previously, these types of studies were limited to “blockbuster” visitors such as Comet Hale-Bopp in the 1990s, NASA sated.
The study, which was led by the Goddard Center for Astrobiology’s Martin Cordiner at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, was published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. The research is also available in preprint version on Arxiv.
Here’s a great video from a camera mounted on the exterior of the TechDemoSat-1, an in-orbit technology demonstration mission from the UK. It launched on July 8, 2014 on a Soyuz-2, and the video shows the satellite moments after separation from the upper stage. The satellite even took a selfie, below.
The video shows the satellite’s rotation and reveals a spectacular vista of “blue marble” Earth (visible is cloudy skies over the Pacific, south of French Polynesia).
It’s interesting to note that some identified flying objects zip past the field of view: At :25 seconds, the Fregat upper stage of the Soyuz-2 rocket appears as a gold object passing away from the satellite left to right at a distance of approximately 60 meters. At :34 seconds a white “dot” crosses the frame left to right – which has been identified as one of the other satellites that shared the ride into orbit with TechDemoSat-1.
Image of the TechDemoSat-1 in orbit, taken minutes after separation of the satellite from the Soyuz-2 launcher and shows a view of the Earth from Space, with the spacecraft’s Antenna Pointing Mechanism in view. Credit: SSTL.
“It is very rare to see actual footage of our satellites in orbit,” said Sir Martin Sweeting, Executive Chairman of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), the company behind the mission, “and so viewing the video taken from TechDemoSat-1 moments after separation from the rocket has been a hugely rewarding and exciting experience for everyone at SSTL. We are delighted with the progress of commissioning the TechDemoSat-1 platform, and are looking forward to the next phase – the demonstration of a range of new technologies being flown on this innovative mission.”
The satellite is roughly the size of a refrigerator but wieghs just 150kg. TechDemoSat (TDS-1) carries eight separate payloads from UK academia and industry plus other payloads from SSTL for product development. Find out more here from SSTL.
An artist’s conception of a distant exomoon blocking out a star’s light. Credit: Dan Durda
I firmly believe that our next greatest discovery will be detecting an exomoon in orbit around a distant exoplanet. Although no one has been able to confirm an exomoon — yet — the hunt is on.
Now, a research team thinks following a trail of radio wave emissions may lead astronomers to this groundbreaking discovery.
