Juno is an asteroid that will be coming into view shortly. To find it, go out into the night in a relatively unpolluted sky and look near Uranus.
You can often see Juno with a descent telescope, but if conditions are good, you should be able to see it with the naked eye.
Juno is the tenth largest known asteroid and is about the size of Maryland.
How to find it:
Continue reading “Hey! Where’s Juno?” … “I think it’s near Uranus!”
Well, not really, but it is an excellent refresher on Genesis. Well, not really it’s …. well just watch it:
Well, not really, but it is interesting.
The mystery of why temperatures in the solar corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere, soar to several million degrees Kelvin (K) –much hotter than temperatures nearer the sun’s surface–has puzzled scientists for decades. New observations made with instruments aboard Japan’s Hinode satellite reveal the culprit to be nanoflares.
Look closely at this picture of Victoria Crater on Mars. Clicking on the picture will give you a really big file, but a much better look. There are a number of things you can see in this view of Victoria that you could not see on earlier version because this is a somewhat oblique view. The details are in the press release I reproduce below the fold. But the other thing you can see that is REALLY FREAKIN’ COOL is the mars rover tracks running along one side of the crater! Go ahead, see if you can find them!
Continue reading New, Very Cool Image of Vic Crater, Mars
The wreckage of the collision between two planets has been observed in outer space.
Continue reading Worlds In Collision … Literally (from NASA)
Unfortunately, NASA is calling it a “wild creature of the dark” with an “eye-like object at its center.” Actually, it is a galaxy, which is plenty cool so they could do without the fancy-talk. Here’s the picture:
It would appear so. We see it in a …
Preliminary image showing a black mark in Jupiters South Polar Region (SPR) which is almost certainly the result of a large impact – either an asteroid or comet – similar to the Shoemaker-Ley impacts in 1994.
This is on Anthony Wesley’s web site, and what appears to be the outcome of an impact event has been photographed by him.
A bit of his post reads:
I started this imaging session on Jupiter at approximately 11pm local time (1300UTC). The weather prediction was not promising, clear skies but a strong jetstream overhead according to the Bureau of Met. The temperature was also unusually high for this time of year (winter), also a bad sign.
The scope in use was my new 14.5″ newtonian, in use now for a few weeks and so far returning excellent images.
I was pleasantly surprised to find reasonable imaging conditions and so I decided to continue recording data until maybe 1am local time. By about midnight (12:10 am) the seeing had deteriorated and I was ready to quit. Indeed I had hovered the mouse over the exit button on my capture application (Coriander for Linux) and then changed my mind and decided instead to simply take a break for 30 minutes and then check back to see if the conditions had improved. It was a very near thing.
When I came back to the scope at about 12:40am I noticed a dark spot rotating into view in Jupiters south polar region started to get curious. When first seen close to the limb (and in poor conditions) it was only a vaguely dark spot, I thouht likely to be just a normal dark polar storm. However as it rotated further into view, and the conditions improved I suddenly realised that it wasn’t just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot.
This week we celebrate the anniversary of the first time human beings walked around on the moon, and as part of that celebration we find NASA releasing improved versions of the original scratchy black and white low resolution images of the first steps taken on the moon by Neil Armstrong. I’m worried that the youngsters out there do not understand the momentous nature of this event. So stand still for a minute while I force some wisdom on you.
Or at least that’s how I heard it, 40 years ago, when Astronaut Neil Armstrong jumped off the pad of the Lunar Modula of Apollo 11 and started kicking around moon dust.
Happy 40th Anniversary, Landing On the Moon.
… Maybe …. Sorta….
We’ve been burned by this one before. As you will recall, the claim was made that the visuals we all saw of the first steps on the moon by humans were a black and white compressed image sent from Australia, shown on a TV at Mission Control (or someplace) and then shot with an old fashioned TV camera (they only had the “old fashioned” ones back in those days, of course).
But, we were told, high quality color videos were taken at the same time but then lost right away. Then, we were told, they were found.
Then we were told by other people who seemed to know what they were talking about that these higher quality tapes did not exist, could not have existed, because the camera needed to make them was not sent to the moon on that first trip.
Well, now we have something directly fro NASA:
Continue reading NASA Really Did Find Lost Tapes That Don’t Exist …
A press release from NASA: Ulysses, a joint NASA and European Space Agency mission, officially ceased operations today, after receiving commands from ground controllers to do so. The spacecraft, which operated for more than 18 years, charted the unexplored regions of space above the poles of the sun.
Continue reading Ulysses Solar-Polar Spacecraft Put To Sleep
PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s long-lived Mars Odyssey spacecraft has completed an eight-month adjustment of its orbit, positioning itself to look down at the day side of the planet in mid-afternoon instead of late afternoon.
This change gains sensitivity for infrared mapping of Martian minerals by the orbiter’s Thermal Emission Imaging System camera. Orbit design for Odyssey’s first seven years of observing Mars used a compromise between what worked best for the infrared mapping and for another onboard instrument.
“The orbiter is now overhead at about 3:45 in the afternoon instead of 5 p.m., so the ground is warmer and there is more thermal energy for the camera’s infrared sensors to detect,” said Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., project scientist for Mars Odyssey.
Some important mineral discoveries by Odyssey stem from mapping done during six months early in the mission when the orbit geometry provided mid-afternoon overpasses. One key example: finding salt deposits apparently left behind when large bodies of water evaporated.
“The new orbit means we can now get the type of high-quality data for the rest of Mars that we got for 10 or 20 percent of the planet during those early six months,” said Philip Christensen of Arizona State University, Tempe, principal investigator for the Thermal Emission Imaging System.
Here’s the trade-off: The orbital shift to mid-afternoon will stop the use of one of three instruments in Odyssey’s Gamma Ray Spectrometer suite. The new orientation will soon result in overheating a critical component of the suite’s gamma ray detector. The suite’s neutron spectrometer and high- energy neutron detector are expected to keep operating. The Gamma Ray Spectrometer provided a dramatic 2002 discovery of water-ice near the Martian surface in large areas. The gamma ray detector has also mapped global distribution of many elements, such as iron, silicon and potassium.
Last year, before the start of a third two-year extension of the Odyssey mission, a panel of planetary scientists assembled by NASA recommended the orbit adjustment to maximize science benefits from the spacecraft in coming years.
Odyssey’s orbit is synchronized with the sun. Picture Mars rotating beneath the polar-orbiting spacecraft with the sun off to one side. The orbiter passes from near the north pole to near the south pole over the day-lit side of Mars. At each point on the Mars surface that turns beneath Odyssey, the solar time of day when the southbound spacecraft passes over is the same. During the five years prior to October 2008, that local solar time was about 5 p.m. whenever Odyssey was overhead. (Likewise, the local time was about 5 a.m. under the track of the spacecraft during the south-to-north leg of each orbit, on the night side of Mars.)
On Sept. 30, 2008, Odyssey fired thrusters for six minutes, putting the orbiter into a “drift” pattern of gradually changing the time-of-day of its overpasses during the next several months. On June 9, Odyssey’s operations team at JPL and at Denver-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems commanded the spacecraft to fire the thrusters again. This five-and-a-half-minute burn ended the drift pattern and locked the spacecraft into the mid-afternoon overpass time.
“The maneuver went exactly as planned,” said JPL’s Gaylon McSmith, Odyssey mission manager.
In another operational change motivated by science benefits, Odyssey has begun in recent weeks making observations other then straight downward-looking. This more-flexible targeting allows imaging of some latitudes near the poles that are never directly underneath the orbiter, and allows faster filling-in of gaps not covered by previous imaging.
“We are using the spacecraft in a new way,” McSmith said.
In addition to extending its own scientific investigations, the Odyssey mission continues to serve as the radio relay for almost all data from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Odyssey’s new orbital geometry helps prepare the mission to be a relay asset for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, scheduled to put the rover Curiosity on Mars in 2012.
Mars Odyssey, launched in 2001, is managed by JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems is the prime contractor for the project. Investigators at Arizona State University operate the Thermal Emission Imaging System. Investigators at the University of Arizona, Tucson, head operation of the Gamma Ray Spectrometer. Additional science partners are located at the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, which provided the high-energy neutron detector, and at Los Alamos National Laboratories, New Mexico, which provided the neutron spectrometer.
For more about the Mars Odyssey mission, visit here.
I have friend who has been trapped in a mostly underground research facility at the South Pole since early winter. She recently broke her foot, which is just tough luck because nobody gets out of there until spring, which is, I think, in October.
This will remind you of the stroy of Dr. Jerri Nielsen, who was at an Antarctic research station and diagnosed herself of having breast cancer, and was rescued rather dramatically back in 1999. Nielsen died, by the way, Tuesday. (Of breast cancer.)
Well, my friend at the South Pole is not going to die of a broken foot. (Though perhaps other people will. Die of her broken foot, that is.) But what is eventually going to happen is that the sun is going to come up.
But on the moon, there are places where, for all practical purposes, the sun never comes up. Just as with the earth, the polar regions receive oblique sun. Now think about that for a second. A crater is essentially a round cliff. While a cliff may blot out the sun from one direction, the sun will eventually be on the other side of the cliff and any shadowed area will be visible. But if the cliff circumscribes an area steeply enough, that area will never, ever have sunlight.
Between the round-cliff effect and the polar oblique sunlight effect, there are craters in the Moon’s polar regions that are not visible. Well, the crater is visible, but not the inside.
Fearing that these dark places may be where Moon Dwellers have set up extensive cities invisible from outer space1, NASA has figured out a way of imaging these craters using radar.
Details from the press release:
This is one of those science stories that is on one hand fairly simple, and on the other hand fairly complex, where the interface between simplicity and complexity causes little balls of misunderstanding to come flying out of the mix like pieces of raw pizza dough if the guy making the pizza was the Tasmanian Devil from the cartoons.
What is true: A scientist named Ryskin proposes that decadal or century scale minor wiggling in the measured Earth’s magnetic field is influenced by changes in ocean currents. Plausible. Interesting. Could explain some things. Not earthshaking.
What is not true: The earth’s magnetic field is caused by ocean currents. The earth’s magnetic field’s long term variations, like reversals in field orientation, are caused by ocean current changes. The Earth’s magnetic field causes oceanic current changes or the currents are the sole cause of secular variation. The cause of the earth’s magnetic field is not, as previously thought, the molten dynamo thingie inside the earth.
Let me explain.
Continue reading New theory on Earth’s Magnetic Field: Theory interesting, reporting botched
This just in from NASA:
PASADENA, Calif. — Astronomers have at last uncovered newborn stars at the frenzied center of our Milky Way galaxy. The discovery was made using the infrared vision of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
Continue reading Baby stars, expected but heretofore unseen, seen.