Cap'n Bob & the Damsel

Rocket Science

The New Hubble Optics

Being a long-time astronomy enthusiast, I am very glad that the Hubble Space Telescope is busily producing magnificent images such as this one of Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 6217, seen on today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day:

barred.jpg

From the HST website:

For the past three months, scientists and engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Goddard have been focusing, testing, and calibrating the instruments. Hubble is one of the most complex space telescopes ever launched, and the Hubble servicing mission astronauts performed major surgery on the 19-year-old observatory’s multiple systems. This orbital verification phase was interrupted briefly July 19 to observe Jupiter in the aftermath of a collision with a suspected comet.

Hubble now enters a phase of full science observations. The demand for observing time will be intense. Observations will range from studying the population of Kuiper Belt objects at the fringe of our solar system to surveying the birth of planets around other stars and probing the composition and structure of extrasolar planet atmospheres. There are ambitious plans to take the deepest-ever near-infrared portrait of the universe to reveal never-before-seen infant galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 500 million years old. Other planned observations will attempt to shed light on the behavior of dark energy, a repulsive force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.

Click on the image above to enlarge.

28 Dec 2009 by Astronomy Rocket Science

Solar Tsunamis

There are signs that the current solar cycle, presently in a relatively low activity state, is on the move to become more active as we enter the second year of the eleven-year cycle. This is a movie of an event captured last February that scientists are calling a “solar tsunami.” It is a towering wave of plasma that lifts itself more than the width of the Earth above the solar surface and hurls massive amounts of solar matter into space.

From NASA:

The twin STEREO spacecraft confirmed their reality in February 2009 when sunspot 11012 unexpectedly erupted. The blast hurled a billion-ton cloud of gas (a “CME”) into space and sent a tsunami racing along the sun’s surface. STEREO recorded the wave from two positions separated by 90o, giving researchers an unprecedented view of the event:

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Above: A solar tsunami seen by the STEREO spacecraft from orthogonal points of view. The gray part of the animation has been contrast-enhanced by subtracting successive pairs of images, resulting in a “difference movie.”

Please note that this is actual science and not the filtered version that you get from, say, the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. You can click on the movie above to see a larger version.

25 Nov 2009 by Aerospace Environment Global Warming Rocket Science

STEREO Solar Globe Movie

solar-movie.gifOver at the STEREO Solar observation website, they now feature an animated image of most of the solar globe. From the vantage points of the STEREO Ahead and Behind spacecraft, images are processed into this movie of the globe. Note the hot regions near the right edge just before the blank region – those spots are not in view of the SOHO spacecraft which sees the sun from the same angle as the Earth from its station at L1, the first Lagrangian point between the Earth and Sun.

From the STEREO website:

STEREO consists of two space-based observatories – one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind. With this new pair of viewpoints, scientists will be able to see the structure and evolution of solar storms as they blast from the Sun and move out through space.

This movie shows a spherical map of the Sun as it currently appears, formed from a combination of the latest STEREO Ahead and Behind beacon images. The movie starts with the view of the Sun as seen from Earth, with the 0 degree meridian line in the middle. The map then rotates through 360 degrees to show the part of the Sun not visible from Earth. The black wedge shows the part of the Sun not yet visible to the STEREO spacecraft.

06 Oct 2009 by Aerospace Rocket Science

Solar Prominence in Stereo

The STEREO project, a constellation of two identical solar probes, one ahead of the Earth (STEREO A) and one behind the Earth (STEREO B), simultaneously imaged a solar prominence from their divergent perspectives. This video was featured on NASA’s SOHO Pick of the Week.

The video below shows the mass ejection in synchronized timing from ahead and behind the Earth.

In the left panel (behind), you can see the event emerging from near the top of the solar disk, while on the right panel (ahead) it is occurring above the solar horizon. In these times when there are few sunspots, the old solar machine is still cranking out the good old nuclear fusion.

30 Aug 2009 by Aerospace Global Warming Rocket Science

Liftoff

Last evening, we paused the DVD player to watch the liftoff of Space Shuttle Discovery. After a couple of aborted countdowns earlier in the week, Discovery, once again, roared into space from the Florida Coast.

Damsel snapped this image with her camera just at the moment of liftoff. Click to enlarge.

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From NASA:

With seven astronauts and a host of experiments and equipment on board, space shuttle Discovery completed a flawless ascent into orbit Friday night to begin a two-day chase of the International Space Station. With Commander Rick “C.J. ” Sturckow at the controls, the shuttle lifted off on-time at 11:59 p.m. EDT from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew will rendezvous and dock with the station Sunday and the crew will begin transferring equipment to the outpost during the 13-day mission.

29 Aug 2009 by Aerospace Rocket Science

NASA Mocks Stephen Colbert

C.O.L.B.E.R.T.NASA Rejected ‘Colbert’ as the name of ISS Node 3 and named it “Tranquility” in commemoration of the first manned Lunar landing in 1969. Colbert did not come away empty-handed though, since the ISS treadmill has been dubbed the ‘Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill,’ or COLBERT.

From NASA:

The International Space Station module formerly known as Node 3 has a new name. After receiving more than a million responses in an online poll, NASA is naming the node “Tranquility.”

The name Tranquility was chosen from thousands of suggestions submitted by participants on www.nasa.gov. The “Help Name Node 3” poll asked people to vote for the module’s name either by choosing one of four options listed by NASA or offering their own suggestion. Tranquility was one of the top ten suggestions submitted by respondents to the poll, which ended March 20.

Colbert, as you may recall, prompted his fan base to write in ‘Colbert’ as the name for Node 3. NASA received a lot of “Colbert” support, but selected “Tranquility.”

I, for one, am amused by the way it turned out. Although NASA was trying to gracefully placate Colbert with this treadmill business, it seems like a smackdown to me.

Click on the logo above to see the full-sized version (courtesy NASA).

16 Apr 2009 by Media Rocket Science

Kepler Spacecraft Launch

kepler.jpgLast evening, we tuned into NASA TV to watch the launch of the Kepler Spacecraft. The countdown procedures went as originally anticipated and the launch was successful.

Kepler’s mission is to statically observe a patch of our galaxy consisting of roughly one hundred thousand stars. The instrumentation consists of a photometer which will monitor the emissions of the stars to try and detect extra-solar planets. The spacecraft can detect the slight dimming of a star as a planet passes in front of it.

Of course, the orbits of such planets would have to be at an angle where the transit would align with Kepler’s line of sight. I’m hoping that the NASA scientists factor the probability of alignment into their equation to determine the planetary count.

The image above (click to enlarge) is an artist’s rendering of what our galaxy might look as viewed from outside our Galaxy. Our sun is about 25,000 light years from the center of our galaxy. The cone illustrates the neighborhood of our galaxy that the Kepler Mission will search to find habitable planets. Credit: Jon Lomberg.

07 Mar 2009 by Aerospace Rocket Science

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