Tuesday, June 24, 2014

NASA’s Saucer-Shaped Mars Vehicle Idea Loses Flight Test ‘Window’ Due To Weather

NASA’s Saucer-Shaped Mars Vehicle Idea Loses Flight Test ‘Window’ Due To Weather:

Artist's impression of NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Artist’s impression of NASA’s Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA has lost its reserved time at a range in Hawaii to test a saucer-shaped vehicle that one day could help spacecraft get on the Red Planet safely.

The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) was supposed to take to the air this month, but bad weather means that officials won’t get to test the vehicle’s flight and landing abilities before their range time expires tomorrow (Saturday).

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Hubble Hubba: Stars Are Being Born Around A Black Hole In Galaxy’s Center

Hubble Hubba: Stars Are Being Born Around A Black Hole In Galaxy’s Center:

Hubble Space Telescope picture of galaxy NGC 3081. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; acknowledgement: R. Buta (University of Alabama)

Hubble Space Telescope picture of galaxy NGC 3081. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; acknowledgement: R. Buta (University of Alabama)
Let’s just casually look at this image of a galaxy 86 million light-years away from us. In the center of this incredible image is a bright loop that you can see surrounding the heart of the galaxy. That is where stars are being born, say the scientists behind this new Hubble Space Telescope image.

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An Ocean On Pluto’s Moon? Hopeful Scientists Will Keep An Eye Out For Cracks

An Ocean On Pluto’s Moon? Hopeful Scientists Will Keep An Eye Out For Cracks:

Artist impression of Pluto and Charon (NASA)

Artist impression of Pluto and Charon (NASA)
It’s a lot of speculation right now, but the buzz in a new NASA study is Pluto’s largest moon (Charon) could have a cracked surface.

If the New Horizons mission catches these cracks when it whizzes by in 2015, this could hint at an ocean underneath the lunar surface — just like what we talk about with Europa (near Jupiter) and Enceladus (near Saturn). But don’t get too excited — it’s also possible Charon had an ocean, but it froze out over time.

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‘Weird’ Dust Ring Baffles In Cloud That Will Give Birth To Giant Stars

‘Weird’ Dust Ring Baffles In Cloud That Will Give Birth To Giant Stars:

A picture of NGC 7538 from data taken by the Herschel Space Observatory. Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Whitman College

A picture of NGC 7538 from data taken by the Herschel Space Observatory. Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Whitman College
Long after telescopes cease operating, their bounty of scientific data continues to amaze. Here’s an example of that: this Herschel Space Telescope image of this dust and gas cloud about 8,000 light-years away.

The examination of NGC 7358 revealed a “weird” dusty ring in the cloud — nobody quite knows how it got there — as well as a baker’s dozen of huge dust clumps that could one day form gigantic stars.

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New Recipe For Saturn’s Orangey Moon Titan Is ‘Aromatic’ And Hazy

New Recipe For Saturn’s Orangey Moon Titan Is ‘Aromatic’ And Hazy:

A fish-eye view of Titan's surface from the European Space Agency's Huygens lander in January 2005. Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

A fish-eye view of Titan’s surface from the European Space Agency’s Huygens lander in January 2005. Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
What’s in all that browny orangey stuff in the atmosphere around Titan? It’s a question that scientists have been trying to answer concerning Saturn’s moon for decades (Carl Sagan was among them). That’s because it’s hard to reverse-engineer the recipe.

There are hundreds of thousands of hydrocarbons (hydrogen and carbon molecules) that could form the compounds in the atmosphere along with nitriles (nitrogen-abundant chemicals). But scientists are hoping that their new recipe gets a bit closer to understanding how the atmosphere works.

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Gaia Space Telescope Team Battles ‘Stray Light’ Problems At Start Of Mission

Gaia Space Telescope Team Battles ‘Stray Light’ Problems At Start Of Mission:

Artist's conception of the Gaia telescope backdropped by a photograph of the Milky Way taken at the European Southern Observatory. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier

Artist’s conception of the Gaia telescope backdropped by a photograph of the Milky Way taken at the European Southern Observatory. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier
Europe’s powerful Milky Way mapper is facing some problems as controllers ready the Gaia telescope for operations. It turns out that there is “stray light” bleeding into the telescope, which will affect how well it can see the stars around it. Also, the telescope optics are also not transmitting as efficiently as the design predicted.

Controllers emphasize the light problem would only affect the faintest visible stars, and that tests are ongoing to minimize the impact on the mission. Still, there will be some effect on how well Gaia can map the stars around it due to this issue.

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Watch the Rise and Fall of a Towering Inferno on the Sun

Watch the Rise and Fall of a Towering Inferno on the Sun:

A solar prominence imaged on May 27, 2014. Earth and Moon are shown to scale at the bottom. (NASA/SDO)

A solar prominence imaged on May 27, 2014. Earth and Moon are shown to scale at the bottom. (Credit: NASA/SDO. Edited by J. Major.)
Caught on camera by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a prominence blazes hundreds of thousands of miles out from the Sun’s surface (i.e., photosphere) on May 27, 2014. The image above, seen in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths, shows a brief snapshot of the event with the column of solar plasma stretching nearly as far as the distance between Earth and the Moon.

Watch a video of the event below:

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Where To Go After Pluto? Hubble Seeks The Next Target For New Horizons

Where To Go After Pluto? Hubble Seeks The Next Target For New Horizons:

Artist's impression of New Horizons' encounter with Pluto and Charon. Credit: NASA/Thierry Lombry

Artist’s impression of New Horizons’ encounter with Pluto and Charon. Credit: NASA/Thierry Lombry
It’s going to be a really busy summer for the New Horizons team. While they’re checking out the newly awakened spacecraft to make sure it’s working properly for its close encounter with Pluto next year, NASA is already thinking about where to put it next: possibly towards a Kuiper Belt Object!

So now the Hubble Space Telescope (in Earth orbit) is scoping out icy objects beyond Pluto. Luckily for us, one of the team members — Alex Parker, a planetary astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, provided an entertaining livetweet of the process — even through a power failure.

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Mercury’s Hot Flow Revealed by MESSENGER

Mercury’s Hot Flow Revealed by MESSENGER:

A hot flow anomaly, or HFA, has been identified around Mercury (Credit: NASA/Duberstein)

A hot flow anomaly, or HFA, has been identified around Mercury (Credit: NASA/Duberstein)
Our Sun is constantly sending a hot stream of charged atomic particles out into space in all directions. Pouring out from holes in the Sun’s corona, this solar wind flows through the Solar System at speeds of over 400 km/s (that’s 893,000 mph). When it encounters magnetic fields, like those generated by planets, the flow of particles is deflected into a bow shock — but not necessarily in a uniform fashion. Turbulence can occur just like in air flows on Earth, and “space weather” results.

One of the more curious effects is a regional reversal of the flow of solar wind particles. Called a “hot flow anomaly,” or HFA, these energetic phenomena occur almost daily in Earth’s magnetic field, as well as on Jupiter and Saturn, and even on Mars and Venus where the magnetic fields are weak (but there are still planets blocking the stream of charged particles.)

Not to be left out in the cold, Mercury is now known to display HFAs, which have been detected for the first time by the MESSENGER spacecraft.

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What Will Rosetta’s Comet Look Like? How Artists Over The Years Pictured It

What Will Rosetta’s Comet Look Like? How Artists Over The Years Pictured It:

Artist's impression (from 2002) of the Philae lander on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA / AOES Medialab

Artist’s impression (from 2002) of the Philae lander on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA / AOES Medialab
Comets are notoriously hard to predict — just ask those people on Comet ISON watch late in 2013. So as Rosetta approaches its cometary target, no one really knows what the comet will look like from up close. Yes, there are pictures of other cometary nuclei (most famously, Halley’s Comet) but this one could look completely different.

Several artists have taken a stab at imagining what Rosetta will see when it gets close to the comet in August, and what Philae will touch on when it reaches the surface in November. You can see their work throughout this article.

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency just issued an update on what they can see of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko from half a million km away — the comet is quieter, they said.

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See This Orange Smudge? This Could Be NASA’s Target For The Asteroid Mission

See This Orange Smudge? This Could Be NASA’s Target For The Asteroid Mission:

An image of asteroid 2011 MD -- a candidate for a potential future mission to an asteroid -- taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in February 2014. The exposure took 20 hours to accomplish and was done in infrared light. Credit: NASA

An image of asteroid 2011 MD — a candidate for a potential future mission to an asteroid — taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope in February 2014. The exposure took 20 hours to accomplish and was done in infrared light. Credit: NASA
In the center of the image above is an orange smudge. It may not look like much to the untrained eye, but to NASA it represents potential. It’s a candidate asteroid target for a mission the agency badly wants to happen, even though nobody knows for sure yet if things will line up for humans to visit there one day.

This is a picture of asteroid 2011 MD taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. It’s about 6 meters (20 feet) across and appears to have a low density, the agency said in a statement. While NASA is still looking for other candidates for its asteroid initiative, the agency added this would be the sort of asteroid it’s looking to visit.

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Powerful Starbursts in Dwarf Galaxies Helped Shape the Early Universe, a New Study Suggests

Powerful Starbursts in Dwarf Galaxies Helped Shape the Early Universe, a New Study Suggests:

GOODS field containing distant dwarf galaxies forming stars at an incredible rate. Image Credit: ESO

GOODS field containing distant dwarf galaxies forming stars at an incredible rate. Image Credit: NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope
Massive galaxies in the early Universe formed stars at a much faster clip than they do today — creating the equivalent of a thousand new suns per year. This rate reached its peak 3 billion years after the Big Bang, and by 6 billion years, galaxies had created most of their stars.

New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope show that even dwarf galaxies — the small, low mass clusters of several billion stars — produced stars at a rapid rate, playing a bigger role than expected in the early history of the Universe.(...)
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Mountains Soar Above the Appalachians in this Dramatic NASA Photo

Mountains Soar Above the Appalachians in this Dramatic NASA Photo:

Giant storm clouds swirl over North Carolina (Credit: NASA / Stu Broce)

Giant storm clouds swirl over North Carolina (Credit: NASA / Stu Broce)
Except these are mountains made of water, not rock! Taken from an altitude of 65,000 feet, the image above shows enormous storm cells swirling high over the mountains of western North Carolina on May 23, 2014. It was captured from one of NASA’s high-altitide ER-2 aircraft during a field research flight as part of the Integrated Precipitation and Hydrology Experiment (IPHEx) campaign.

The photo was NASA’s Image of the Day for June 19, 2014.

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How to Find Your Way Around the Milky Way This Summer

How to Find Your Way Around the Milky Way This Summer:

The band of the Milky Way stretches from Cygnus (left) to the Sagittarius in this wide-angle, guided photo. Credit: Bob King

The band of the Milky Way stretches from Cygnus (left) to Sagittarius in this wide-angle, guided photo. For skywatchers in mid-northern latitudes, the summer Milky Way is the richest, brightest portion of the galaxy. Faint strips of airglow appear at lower left. Credit: Bob King
Look east on a dark June night and you’ll get a face full of stars. Billions of them. With the moon now out of the sky for a couple weeks, the summer Milky Way is putting on a grand show. Some of its members are brilliant like Vega, Deneb and Altair in the Summer Triangle, but most are so far away their weak light blends into a hazy, luminous band that stretches the sky from northeast to southwest. Ever wonder just where in the galaxy you’re looking on a summer night? Down which spiral arm your gaze takes you? (...)
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Supermassive Black Hole Shows Strange Gas Movements

Supermassive Black Hole Shows Strange Gas Movements:

A Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 5548. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA. Acknowledgement: Davide de Martin

A Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 5548. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA. Acknowledgement: Davide de Martin
Sometimes it takes a second look — or even more — at an astronomical object to understand what’s going on. This is what happened after astronomers obtained this image of NGC 5548 using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013. While crunching the data, they saw some gas moving around the galaxy in a way that they did not understand.

From the supermassive black hole embedded in the galaxy’s heart, the researchers detected gas moving outward quite quickly — blocking about 90% of the X-rays being emitted from the black hole, a common feature of objects of this type. So, astronomers marshalled a bunch of telescopes to figure out the answer.

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A New Mantra: Follow the Methane — May Advance Search for Extraterrestrial Life

A New Mantra: Follow the Methane — May Advance Search for Extraterrestrial Life:

Extrasolar planet HD189733b rises from behind its star. Is there methane on this planet? Image Credit: ESA

Extrasolar planet HD189733b rises from behind its star. The new work presented here shows this planet has 20 times more methane than previously thought. Image Credit: ESA
The search for life is largely limited to the search for water. We look for exoplanets at the correct distances from their stars for water to flow freely on their surfaces, and even scan radiofrequencies in the “water hole” between the 1,420 MHz emission line of neutral hydrogen and the 1,666 MHz hydroxyl line.

When it comes to extraterrestrial life, our mantra has always been to “follow the water.” But now, it seems, astronomers are turning their eyes away from water and toward methane — the simplest organic molecule, also widely accepted to be a sign of potential life.

Astronomers at the University College London (UCL) and the University of New South Wales have created a powerful new methane-based tool to detect extraterrestrial life, more accurately than ever before.(...)
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India’s 1st Mars Mission Celebrates 100 Days and 100 Million Kilometers from Mars Orbit Insertion Firing – Cruising Right behind NASA’s MAVEN

India’s 1st Mars Mission Celebrates 100 Days and 100 Million Kilometers from Mars Orbit Insertion Firing – Cruising Right behind NASA’s MAVEN:

India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) marked 100 days from Mars on June 16, 2014 and the Mars Orbit Insertion engine firing when it arrives at the Red Planet on Sept 24, 2014 after its 10 month interplanetary journey. Credit ISRO

India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) marked 100 days from Mars on June 16, 2014 and the Mars Orbit Insertion engine firing when it arrives at the Red Planet on September 24, 2014 after its 10 month interplanetary journey. Credit ISRO
India’s inaugural voyager to the Red Planet, the Mars Orbiter Mission or MOM, has just celebrated 100 days and 100 million kilometers out from Mars on June 16, until the crucial Mars Orbital Insertion (MOI) engine firing that will culminate in a historic rendezvous on September 24, 2014.

MOM is cruising right behind NASA’s MAVEN orbiter which celebrated 100 days out from Mars on Friday the 13th of June. MAVEN arrives about 48 hours ahead of MOM on September 21, 2014. (...)
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Rosetta Detects Water on its Target Comet

Rosetta Detects Water on its Target Comet:

Artist's impression (from 2002) of Rosetta orbiting Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA, image by AOES Medialab

Artist’s impression (from 2002) of Rosetta orbiting Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA, image by AOES Medialab
It’s no surprise that there is a lot of water in comets. The “dirty snowballs” (or dusty ice-balls, more accurately) are literally filled with the stuff, so much in fact it’s thought that comets played a major role in delivering water to Earth. But every comet is unique, and the more we learn about them the more we can understand the current state of our Solar System and piece together the history of our planet.

ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft is now entering the home stretch for its rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August. While it has already visually imaged the comet on a couple of occasions since waking from its hibernation, its instruments have now successfully identified water on 67P for the first time, from a distance of 360,000 km – about the distance between Earth and the Moon.

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‘Time Capsule On Mars’ Team Hopes To Send a Spacecraft There With Your Messages

‘Time Capsule On Mars’ Team Hopes To Send a Spacecraft There With Your Messages:

Mars photographed with the Mars Global Surveyor.

Mars photographed with the Mars Global Surveyor.
It’s an ambitious goal: land three Cubesats on Mars sometime in the next few years for $25 million. And all this from a student-led team.

But the group, led by Duke University, is dutifully assembling sponsors and potential in-kind contributions from universities and companies to try to reach that goal. So far they have raised more than half a million dollars.

“We were thinking that something was missing,” said Emily Briere, the student team project lead who attends Duke University, explaining how it seemed few Mars missions were being done for the benefit of humanity in general.

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An Earth-size Diamond in the Sky: The Coolest Known White Dwarf Detected

An Earth-size Diamond in the Sky: The Coolest Known White Dwarf Detected:



Artist impression of a white dwarf star in orbit with pulsar PSR J2222-0137. It may be the coolest and dimmest white dwarf ever identified. Credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

An artist’s conception of a white dwarf star in orbit with pulsar PSR J2222-0137. Image Credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)
We live in a vast, dark Universe, which makes the smallest and coolest objects extremely difficult to detect, save for a stroke of luck. Often times this luck comes in the form of a companion. Take, for example, the first exoplanet detected due to its orbit around a pulsar — a rapidly spinning neutron star.

A team of researchers using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Green Bank Telescope and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), as well as other observatories have repeated the story, detecting an object in orbit around a distant pulsar. Except this time it’s the coldest, faintest white dwarf ever detected. So cool, in fact, its carbon has crystallized.

The punch line is this: with the help of a pulsar, astronomers have detected an Earth-size diamond in the sky.(...)

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Sunday, June 8, 2014

Pink Floyd and Coldplay Go to Space

Pink Floyd and Coldplay Go to Space:



Two great music videos published this week feature incredible imagery from space. Above, Pink Floyd released an 20th anniversary video version of their instrumental “Marooned” which uses timelapse video photography taken by astronauts on the International Space Station (which we’ve featured many times, like here and here). For you Pink Floyd-aphiles, the anniversary edition of ‘The Division Bell‘ will be released on June 30th — including a double vinyl edition!

Below, a new video from Coldplay and their song “Sky Full of Stars” uses aurora imagery taken by Swedish astrophotopher Göran Strand, whose work we post frequently:

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Physicists Pave the Way to Turn Light into Matter

Physicists Pave the Way to Turn Light into Matter:

This artist's conception shows two photons (in green) colliding. Image Credit: ATLAS / LHC

This artist’s conception shows two photons (in green) colliding. Image Credit: ATLAS / LHC
E = mc². It’s one of the most basic and fundamental equations throughout astrophysics. But it does more than suggest that mass and energy are interconnected, it implies that light can be physically transformed into matter.

But can it really — physically — be done? Scientists proposed the theory more than 80 years ago, but only today have they paved the way to make this transformation routinely on Earth.

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New Supernova Likely Arose From Massive Wolf-Rayet Star

New Supernova Likely Arose From Massive Wolf-Rayet Star:

M1-67 is the youngest wind-nebula around a Wolf-Rayet star, called WR124, in our Galaxy. Credit: ESO

M1-67 is the youngest wind-nebula around a Wolf-Rayet star, called WR124, in our Galaxy. Credit: ESO
They’ve been identified as possible causes for supernovae for a while, but until now, there was a lack of evidence linking massive Wolf-Rayet stars to these star explosions. A new study was able to find a “likely” link between this star type and a supernova called SN 2013cu, however.

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“With a Little Help From Their Friends,” Magnetars Form in Binary Systems, New Study Suggests

“With a Little Help From Their Friends,” Magnetars Form in Binary Systems, New Study Suggests:

This artist’s impression shows the magnetar in the very rich and young star cluster Westerlund 1. This remarkable cluster contains hundreds of very massive stars, some shining with a brilliance of almost one million suns. European astronomers have for the first time demonstrated that this magnetar — an unusual type of neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field — probably was formed as part of a binary star system. The discovery of the magnetar’s former companion elsewhere in the cluster helps solve the mystery of how a star that started off so massive could become a magnetar, rather than collapse into a black hole. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

This artist’s conception shows the magnetar in the very rich and young star cluster Westerlund 1. Image Credit: ESO / L. Calçada
Astronomy is a discipline of extremes. We’re constantly searching for the most powerful, the most explosive, and the most energetic objects in the Universe. Magnetars — extremely dense and highly magnetic neutron stars — are no exception to the rule. They’re the strongest known magnets in the Universe, millions of times more powerful than the strongest magnets on Earth.

But their origin has eluded astronomers for 35 years. Now, an international team of astronomers think they’ve found the partner star of a magnetar for the first time, an observation that suggests magnetars form in binary star systems.

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Amateur Asteroid Hunters Take Note: NASA and Slooh Will Ask For Your Help

Amateur Asteroid Hunters Take Note: NASA and Slooh Will Ask For Your Help:

Artist's impression of an asteroid breaking up. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Artist’s impression of an asteroid breaking up. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Do you lack a telescope, but have a burning desire to look for asteroids near Earth? No problem! NASA and the Slooh telescope network will soon have you covered, as the two entities have signed a new agreement allowing citizen scientists to look at these objects using Slooh.

This is all related to NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge (which includes the agency’s desire to capture and redirect an asteroid for further study.) What the two entities want to do is show citizen astronomers how to study asteroids after they are discovered by professionals, looking at properties such as their size and rotation and light reflectivity.

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Selfies from Around the World Combine to Make a Portrait of Earth

Selfies from Around the World Combine to Make a Portrait of Earth:

Images of Earth assembled from over 36,000 fan-submitted "selfless" on Earth Day, April 22, 2014 (NASA)

Images of Earth assembled from over 36,000 fan-submitted “selfless” on Earth Day, April 22, 2014 (NASA)
On Earth Day, April 22, NASA invited people around the world to share their “selfies” on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Instagram, showing where on Earth they are and marking them with the hashtag #GlobalSelfie. Well, here we are a month later and the results have just been released… proof of what a beautiful world we all make up!

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