The Juno spacecraft began its long journey to Jupiter in 2011. Waking up in 2016 it underwent a successful orbit injection on July 4th. Now after nearly a year of waiting, the public finally gets to see the first fruits of the mission. It has certainly been worth the wait. A new Jupiter, seen from a distance of 52,000 Km, has a vivid and chaotic southern pole in the above image. Swirling storms thousands of kilometres across whirl around one another in a sea of gaseous ammonia clouds. Will the system remain chaotic? Or will it change a year from...
For 4.5 billion years, life evolved on planet Earth. Not once were the inhabitants of this tiny blue mote of dust able to gaze upon their home as one entity. To them it had always been an endless land without borders and an endless supply of food and resources. Most of them were blissfully unaware that they could ever venture further, and so they accepted the boundaries of their existence unquestionably. Once humans started making tools, we were taken down a path of discovery that would let us escape the bounds of our shrinking world. Finally, just over 70 years...
For three years I’ve been talking about this eclipse. August 21st, 2017 is a date that feels etched into my skull. With solar eclipses being few and far between, and usually occuring far from my home in Canada, I’m excited that the great american eclipse of 2017 will be within my budget for travel. Though like many people, I’m ready to pay a bit extra to get to the right spot. The eclipse is expected to draw over 100 million people to the many towns and cities along the path of totality. Though most of the population of North America...
I hate the term ‘supermoon’. In fact that is the only time I’m going to use that term during this entire post. The Moon does appear a tiny bit larger in the sky, but it’s not an uncommon thing. Here’s why this one was particularly good at driving headlines. The technical term for the full Moon we saw this past week is a ‘perigee syzygy,’ which I think sounds way cooler. Perigee is the term for the Moon’s closest point to the Earth in it’s orbit, and syzygy is the term for an alignment of bodies in space, in this...
Tomorrow, one way or another, the ESA’s Rosetta mission is coming to an end. In a final maneuver, the craft will attempt to land on the surface of the comet, following in the footsteps of the Philae lander, though hopefully with more success. The video shows the final orbit plan, and really highlights how amazing mission scientists are to be able to plan a landing site when the comet is rotating so quickly, relative to the craft’s motion. You can follow the link to watch the live broadcast of the event here. The mission will end around 7:20am EST tomorrow,...
In the past year or so it’s been interesting to see space agencies and companies produce movie-type trailers for scientific expeditions. The technology is there, and it is a proven way to inspire the general public. It also creates an opportunity to create some of the amazing science being done, even if it’s just a small taste. Space X has been candid about wanting to colonize Mars, and yesterday they released a trailer to give some inspiration to all of us. It shows a system that utilizes their nearly-established system of landing and reusing rockets, as well as refueling in...
Here is a map of the nations of the world that use the two systems of measurement. Metric shown in blue and imperial shown in red. While it’s not always good to go with the crowd, there is a reason why more nations use the metric system. An often-cited passage from the book Wild Thing by Josh Bazell: “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount...
Have you ever read the story of the discovery of Neptune? It truly is a triumph of science and mathematics, and part of the reason it is my favourite planet (a hard choice to make). The story goes like this: It all starts with the discovery of Uranus in 1781 by William Herschel. This was the first ever discovery of a planet, as the Earth and the five visible planets have been known of since the dawn of history. Thanks to Isaac Newton working out the laws of gravitation and the mechanics of the solar system, mathematicians could easily calculate the properties...
In the year 1610, it was commonly believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe, that all bodies rotated around the perfect planet, placed by god with the heavens around it. Galileo Galilei dealt a major blow to this idea, by using an early telescope to improve his vision and look up at some surprising dots. These dots formed a line that went straight through the bright planet Jupiter. As Galileo looked again and again, night after night, he noticed that they not only persisted, they moved. Their motion was predictable, and Galileo realized that they were orbiting Jupiter, just...
Not just the title of an excellent Futurama episode, but now a real place. A planet has been found orbiting in a triple star system, a surprising find that may be more common than once thought. Astronomers from the University of Arizona used the European Southern Observatory (ESO)’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to directly image the new planet as it orbits the brightest star in a triple system 320 light years away, in the constellation Centaurus. Orbits like this are thought to be extremely unstable due to the varying gravitational field in the system. “HD 131399Ab is one of the few exoplanets that...
