NASA to Probe the Universe's First Moments

(NASA) - Sophisticated new technologies created by NASA and university scientists are enabling them to build an instrument designed to probe the first moments of the universe's existence.

Former NASA scientist Chuck Bennett, now an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, Md., won a $5-million National Science Foundation grant to build a new ground-based instrument, the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS). Bennett is building CLASS with his collaborators at th [...]

Full story at http://spacefellowship.com/news/art19831/nasa-to-probe-the-universe-s-first-moments.html

ISS Progress 37 Launches, Time Off for Station Crew

(NASA) - The ISS Progress 37 cargo carrier launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday at 12:15 p.m. EDT loaded with 2.6 tons of food, fuel, oxygen, propellant and supplies for the Expedition 23 crew.

The Progress is scheduled to dock to the Pirs docking compartment of the International Space Station using the automated Kurs docking system at 2:35 p.m. Saturday.



As the Progress made its way to the orbiting complex Thursday, the Expedition 23 crew members enjoyed s [...]

Full story at http://spacefellowship.com/news/art19834/iss-progress-37-launches-time-off-for-station-crew.html

Cameron wants to install 3-D cam on next NASA Mars rover

MOSCOW, (RIA Novosti) - The reigning king of 3-D cinema, U.S. filmmaker James Cameron, persuaded NASA to install a 3-D cam on the Curiosity rover to be launched to the Red Planet in 2011, the Pasadena Star News reported.

The "Avatar" director met with NASA administrator Charles Bolden in a one-on-one meeting in January and even convinced the space agency to buy a 3-D cam.

"He actually was really open to the idea," Cameron said. "Our first meeting went very well."

The new cam is being bu [...]

Full story at http://spacefellowship.com/news/art19838/cameron-wants-to-install-3-d-cam-on-next-nasa-mars-rover.html

SDO opens its eyes and sees our star like never before

Last week, NASA presented the first images and videos from its latest and greatest eye on the Sun: the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

SDO has been in the works for a long, long time, and I’ve been anxiously awaiting data from it for years… so of course I was away from my computer when the images were released. Still, it was worth a few extra days to see something as back-of-the-neck-hair-raising as this:

Holy Haleakala! Click to emprominate.



As if on cue, just days after SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) was switched on, the Sun threw an epic fit, blasting out an arcing prominence perfectly positioned for us to see. A prominence is a loop of gas that erupts from the surface of the Sun. This gas follows the Sun’s magnetic field lines; complicated interplay between the energy stored in the field lines versus their tension causes them to leap up from the Sun, anchored in two spots that represent where the north and south poles of the lines punch through the Sun’s surface. A prominence might have as much as a hundred billion tons of matter in it, and can be hundreds of thousands of kilometers across.

To give you an idea of this, here’s a video made from images from AIA:

Kaboom! Interestingly, the gas isn’t as hot as you might think, and can be cooler than the surface of the Sun. When we see a prominence edge-on, silhouetted against the surface of the Sun, it actually appears dark! When that happens, we call it a filament.

I’ve been a big fan of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) for a long time, and SDO is like the Son of SOHO. It has technology that is more current, and has very high resolution cameras. SDO can take spectra of the Sun to look in detail at its composition, temperature, motion, and magnetic strength. It can also measure the seismology of the surface of the Sun, the way waves travel across it and make it pulse; this tells us about the interior of the Sun that is otherwise totally invisible. Combining all this data together yields a vast amount of knowledge waiting to be learned about our nearest star.

It also produces stunning full-Sun imagery:

This image is amazing; it shows very hot helium and iron ranging in temperature from 60,000 Kelvin (100,000+° F) to well over a million Kelvins (1.8 million degrees F)! You can see the big prominence to the left, as well as several others around the disk. All the twisting and writhing on the surface is due to the bubbling convection of hot material from the Sun’s interior rising to the surface coupled with the fiercely complex solar magnetic field. The physics involved is incredibly complex, but with SDO’s help scientists will soon have a much firmer grasp on what’s going on.

Of course, they’ll also have a pile of new mysteries to ponder as well. The Sun is the closest star to the Earth, and closer than most planets. We know a lot about it, but there’s so much left to understand: what’s the root cause of the 5.5 year long solar magnetic cycle? How is that tied to Earth’s climate? What effect do sunspots have on the Sun and Earth? How exactly does the Sun influence space weather; the flood of subatomic particles streaming from the solar surface and interacting with out own magnetic field, affecting satellites and even our power grid?

Science is like a tapestry with no edge, and with holes located here and there in the fabric. We can fill those holes ever more, and explore the edges, pushing them back with each new discovery. Along with many other observatories like it, SDO is our loom that helps us create and follow that weave.

Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA, NASA/GSFC/SDO/AIA

Full story at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BadAstronomyBlog/~3/0gSdQ61uxS8/

Webb Telescope Passes Mission Milestone

WASHINGTON, (NASA) -- NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has passed its most significant mission milestone to date, the Mission Critical Design Review, or MCDR. This signifies the integrated observatory will meet all science and engineering requirements for its mission.

"I'm delighted by this news and proud of the Webb program's great technical achievements," said Eric Smith, Webb telescope program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The independent team conducting the review confir [...]

Full story at http://spacefellowship.com/news/art19804/webb-telescope-passes-mission-milestone.html

ISS Progress 37 Launches to Space Station

(NASA) - The ISS Progress 37 cargo carrier launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday at 12:15 p.m. EDT.

Scheduled to dock at the International Space Station Saturday, the unmanned Progress spaceship is loaded with 2.6 tons of food, fuel, oxygen, propellant and supplies for the Expedition 23 crew.



The Progress is similar in appearance and some design elements to the Soyuz spacecraft, which brings crew members to the station, serves as a lifeboat while they are th [...]

Full story at http://spacefellowship.com/news/art19809/iss-progress-37-launches-to-space-station.html

NASA's New Eye on the Sun Delivers Stunning First Images

WASHINGTON, (NASA) -- NASA's recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is returning early images that confirm an unprecedented new capability for scientists to better understand our sun's dynamic processes. These solar activities affect everything on Earth.

Some of the images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun's surface. The spacecraft also has made the first  [...]

Full story at http://spacefellowship.com/news/art19813/nasa-s-new-eye-on-the-sun-delivers-stunning-first-images.html

Huge solar eruption caught by SDO!

On April 19, 2010, NASA’s newly-launched Solar Dynamics Observatory caught a massive eruption on the Sun, called a prominence, as it blasted millions of tons of 60,000 K (100,000° F) gas off the surface of the Sun. Check out this amazing footage as the material blows upward, then rains back down onto the Sun’s surface.

Holy Haleakala! If you watch carefully, you can see little hot spots flash as the gas hits the Sun again. At about 31 seconds, a thin streamer comes screaming back down; look carefully where it hits and you’ll see those spots. This animation is actually about four hours worth of images strung together.



Note the scale of this scene: it shows a region about 100,000 km (60,000 miles) across! The Earth would easily fit under the arch of this rising gas.

Oh– before you ask, that dark hair-like thing is a piece of dust or some other detritus in the SDO camera. That’s aggravating, but I’m hoping the engineers will figure out a way of getting rid of it or at least minimizing its influence.

Prominences like this have been seen for decades, but never in this much detail. And even though SDO has only been flying for a few weeks, it’s already solved one mystery: why the rain of gas moves more slowly than expected as it rains back down. You can’t see it in this video (but you can on this page about SDO) but there is a layer of much hotter gas near the surface of the Sun. This gas, at about 1,000,000 Kelvin (1.7 million° F) cushions the fall of the rain, slowing it down. SDO’s high resolution and ability to measure the temperature of the gas allows astronomers to understand this phenomenon for the first time.

SDO is extremely cool, and will be providing solar astronomers with more data than they can possibly handle for decades. But that’s good! It’s always nice to have more data than less. The Sun is fiendishly complex and difficult to understand in detail, so SDO will be an incredibly useful tool to help astronomers figure out what’s what.

After all: there not be anything new under the Sun, but there are always new ways of looking at it.

Credit: SDO/AIA

Full story at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BadAstronomyBlog/~3/o9nietp0qfc/

Changes to Last Two Planned Shuttle Launches

(NASA) - NASA is planning to make some changes to the target launch dates for the last two scheduled space shuttle flights. Scientists with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS, program recently decided to change out the current magnet in the particle physics experiment module that will be attached to the International Space Station to a longer lasting one. This will take advantage of NASA's plan to extend station operations until at least 2020.

Because of the magnet change, space shuttle  [...]

Full story at http://spacefellowship.com/news/art19787/changes-to-last-two-planned-shuttle-launches.html

Orbital Successfully Launches First Minotaur IV Rocket for U.S. Air Force

(Orbital) -- Successful Flight of Minotaur IV Extends Perfect Launch Record of Minotaur Family to 17 Missions

Suborbital Launch of Peacekeeper-Based Rocket Supports DARPA?s HTV-2 Hypersonic Research Mission

(Dulles, VA) -- Orbital Sciences Corporation (NYSE: ORB), one of the world?s leading space technology companies, today announced that it successfully launched the first Minotaur IV rocket in support of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency?s (DARPA) Hypersonic Technology V [...]

Full story at http://spacefellowship.com/news/art19791/orbital-successfully-launches-first-minotaur-iv-rocket-for-u-s-air-force.html

Russia to send freighter with candy, books to ISS

MOSCOW, (RIA Novosti) - Russia will launch a cargo module to the International Space Station (ISS) on April 28, mission control said on Tuesday.

It said the Progress M-05M freighter will lift off on a Soyuz-U rocket at 21:15 Moscow time from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan and is due to dock with the ISS at 23:35 Moscow time.

Mission control said it will deliver over 2.5 tons of supplies, including equipment, parcels from home, chocolate, candy, new video films and books.

Progre [...]

Full story at http://spacefellowship.com/news/art19794/russia-to-send-freighter-with-candy-books-to-iss.html

Hubble Gotchu

I have to say, this made me smile. And even laugh.

True enough, Hubble got me. I can’t even complain that it’s the Bubble Nebula, not galaxy. Even I’m not that picky.

Full story at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BadAstronomyBlog/~3/iNRI3VvD_gc/

Cassini Measures Tug of Enceladus

(NASA) - NASA's Cassini spacecraft will be gliding low over Saturn's moon Enceladus for a gravity experiment designed to probe the moon's interior composition. The flyby, which will take Cassini through the water-rich plume flaring out from Enceladus's south polar region, will occur on April 27 Pacific time and April 28 UTC. At closest approach, Cassini will be flying about 100 kilometers (60 miles) above the moon's surface.

Cassini's scientists plan to use the radio science instrument to mea [...]

Full story at http://spacefellowship.com/news/art19751/cassini-measures-tug-of-enceladus.html

Expedition 23 Works on New Crew Quarters, Maintenance

(NASA) - Aboard the orbiting International Space Station, the Expedition 23 crew spent Monday outfitting its newest crew quarters facility and performing maintenance.

Commander Oleg Kotov and Flight Engineer Mikhail Kornienko worked to outfit the newest crew quarters, which was delivered to the station aboard space shuttle Discovery during the STS-131 mission. The modular crew quarters facilities provide each of the station?s occupants with their own ?personal space? that resembles a b [...]

Full story at http://spacefellowship.com/news/art19755/expedition-23-works-on-new-crew-quarters-maintenance.html

Russia's Cosmos-3M space carrier orbits military satellite

MOSCOW, (RIA Novosti) - A Russian carrier rocket orbited a military satellite on Tuesday at 6:08 Moscow time (2:08 GMT), a spokesman for the Russian Space Forces said.

The Cosmos-3M rocket lifted off earlier on Tuesday from the Plesetsk space center in northwest Russia.

The military satellite is a new addition to a Russian network of about 60-70 military reconnaissance satellites.

The Cosmos-3M is a liquid-fueled two-stage rocket, first launched in 1967, with over 410 successful launche [...]

Full story at http://spacefellowship.com/news/art19759/russia-s-cosmos-3m-space-carrier-orbits-military-satellite.html

Hubble celebrates 20 years in space with a jaw-dropper

I was out of town at a wedding this weekend, so I missed blogging about the spectacular image release for the Hubble Space Telescope’s 20th anniversary (here’s the US site). And yikes, it’s simply mind-smackingly mind smacking. Behold:

Ye gods. Click to get access to massively embiggened versions.

This is a stunning close-up of a section of the vast Carina Nebula, a sprawling and complex Escher-like region of gas and dust about 7500 light years away. It’s the scene of chaotic star birth and death, slammed and reslammed by winds from stars being born and others busy blowing up.



In this image — which is only a part of the full view of this magnificent vista — the tentacles of dust tower light-years in length, and at the tips of those fingers are stars that are just now forming. The material around them is thicker than what surrounds it, and can partially withstand the onslaught of subatomic particles and fierce ultraviolet being blasted about by hot, young, massive stars nearby, off the top of the image. This wind and light blow away the lighter material, leaving behind these structures that are essentially sandbars in space, material protected by the denser gas and dust at the tips.

All along the sides of the towers you can see streamers of material, filleted tenuous wisps that appear to be flowing from the towers themselves. But, in fact, this is matter flooding past the towers, gas slamming into and screaming around them. Look around the image and you can see the shock waves, the tremendous forces at play here. To give you a grasp of this, the battle ground for this action is tens of trillions of kilometers across, and the material is moving at a million kilometers per hour.

This is sculpting on a scale that would make Zeus cower in fear. But Nature does it as a matter of course.

And the forces at work here are capable of beauty and incredible detail. For example, cast your eyes upon this feature located at the tip of the uppermost trunk:

This is my favorite part of the image, and not just because it looks like an angry gray alien (though admittedly that does add a bit of cool). The reason I love it (and the other one located at the tip of the fatter tower to the lower left) are the twin beams of material coming out of either side of it. Those jets of matter are caused by the forming star at the center; the star is being bron in the center of a flattened disk called an accretion disk. Complex magnetic fields are at play here, and they cause the gas in the disk to be propelled away, up and out from the star’s poles, at high speed. Note the beautiful sculpted shock wave at the left end of the jet as it plows into the dense material in the nebula itself. We see lots of these paired jets — called Herbig-Haro Objects — and they mark the positions of new stars. Our Sun may have looked a lot like this about 4.6 billion years ago.

Now let’s take a step back. Here’s a fascinating look at this scene, comparing the view in visible light to that of infrared:

Note that in the left (visible) image, you don’t see very many stars. The dust is thick in Carina, and that blocks the light from the stars. But in the IR (right), the light can pass through the dust and we see many more stars. A lot of the detail in the towers disappears because the pillars are transparent in IR, so we lose that part of the picture. In the visible, the colors represent light from glowing oxygen (blue), hydrogen and nitrogen (green), and sulfur (red). These are not necessarily the most abundant elements in the gas (well, hydrogen is), but they tend to glow the brightest and are easiest to see.

So this is more than just (just! ha!) a beautiful image. The multi-color versions of it tell us the temperature, the density, and the elemental composition of the gas and dust as well. By examining clouds like this one, we learn about the vast and subtle processes that take place when stars are born en masse.

There is so much to see here that I could go on for quite some time about it. But I think I’ll just leave it here. Go and download the hi-res versions of these images and simply play with them. Have fun, and keep in mind that what you are seeing here was unimaginable just a few decades ago. The things we can do now…

You can read more about Hubble’s 20th anniversary at NASA’s special page. You can also check out my Ten Things You Don’t Know About Hubble for more insight into my own involvement with this magnificent observatory.

Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)

Full story at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BadAstronomyBlog/~3/h0rO1i8G3ok/